


Star Trek Revisited: Rewatching TOS in the 21st Century

by PlaidAdder



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Criticism, Episode Review, F/M, Gen, Gender Issues, M/M, Male Slash, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-24
Updated: 2013-06-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 01:42:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 79
Words: 222,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/856342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A complete series of episode reviews written after re-watching all three seasons of Star Trek (the original series) between 2011-2013. Each review consists of a plot synopsis (rendered as entertaining as possible) followed by analysis/reflection. These reviews were originally posted on <a href="http://idairsauthor.livejournal.com">LiveJournal.</a> I am crossposting them here, where it is much easier to keep the whole series in one place.</p><p>I first became a fan of TOS in the 1980s when I was an adolescent girl. I am now a middle-aged lesbian who, let's say, knows a lot more about gender issues than I did back then. There will be some discussion of same. If you're not interested in gender politics, you might not have a whole lot of fun with these reviews. If you are, though, you may discover that gender in TOS is actually more complicated--a Vulcan might even call it fascinating--than it might at first appear. </p><p>I love the show, but I do not love it uncritically. I believe there is much to be learned by asking the question: Exactly why and how did this particular episode get this bad?</p><p>Oh, also, I see slash people. But in TOS, believe me, it's there. And not just because we want it to be there, either. Enjoy!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. THE MAN-TRAP

**Author's Note:**

> I rewatched the episodes in the order in which they were originally broadcast. My review of "The Cage," which was thought to be lost until fairly recently, is last. We begin with "The Man-Trap," which was the first episode broadcast, for no good reason other than the fact that it was one of the few that was ready on time.
> 
> The "Man-Trap" review was written up before I started putting more thought and effort into the project, so the analysis section is very short; the reviews get more complex as the series goes on. I have preserved the entries as they were first posted (minus typographical and factual errors) so that you may enjoy the Journey of Discovery.
> 
> These reviews can be read stand-alone but there is a kind of narrative arc as well. As the weeks rolled by I invented a few terms for common TOS phenomena which may confuse the casual reader; in the endnote there's a handy glossary. Enjoy!

 

**STARDATE: May 24, 2011** **  
EPISODE #1: THE MAN-TRAP** **  
WRITTEN BY: George Clayton-Johnson**

So, as part of my still very lame exercise program, I'm re-watching the original series _Star Trek_ while working out. Figure I may as well do episode reviews.

Actually, so say that I am re-watching the original show would be wrong. I am watching the 'remastered' DVD of the original show, and as I just discovered through my viewing of the featurette included with Disk One, they didn't just clean up the negative. They redid all the 'exterior' special effects with CGI.

Some ranting about that:

What that means is that for any part of any episode that shows the _Enterprise_ in space, they replaced the original shots of the model with computer-generated animation. Ditto for the original renderings of space, stars, planets viewed from space, battles...basically anything that was not shot on a sound stage in the original series has been recreated in CGI. The Enterprise still looks like the old Enterprise in that it is shaped the same, but of course its 'look' is very different and a lot more like the look of the last three _Star Wars_ films than the look of the original series. The representation of space and the 'exterior shots' of planets and other ships look completely different as well. And they've changed some of the content of the exterior shots as well. Even the interior stuff has been digitally manipulated to provide more contrast and eliminate that blurred haziness so characteristic of the old tapes they used to broadcast late at night on Channel 11.

Oh, and for some of the landing shots on the planets, they've replaced the original backgrounds with CGI ones and digitally added details and features that weren't there before.

And they re-recorded the original theme music and then added Shatner's original voice over on top of it.

Everyone interviewed about this in the featurette talked very enthusiastically about how this was all honoring the spirit of the original and doing it the way the original team would have WANTED to do it, etc. May be true, may not be true. Nevertheless, it makes me sad, because I cannot recreate the original experience of watching the show. I mean to REALLY recreate it I would need my parents' basement, but anyway.

As I was watching them talk about replacing the backgrounds I realized why I was so attached to the old cheesiness. For whatever episode it was--"Arena," I think--they showed the original background and said, "Clearly, this is just a picture of a dented and beat-up piece of metal." Because ST:TOS was made before digital effects--WAY before digital effects--they had to use ordinary physical objects and just do optical tricks to make them look otherworldly. It made the whole thing pretty funny sometimes; but it also made it, fundamentally, more like theater. And in a way, more like engineering--or at least the only kind of engineering I can do, in which you use whatever you can find in the garage (because you're too disorganized to buy ahead of time and too ignorant to know what to buy anyway) and you make it be what you need it to be.

Anyway, none of this matters much to "The Man-Trap," which doesn't have any interstellar battles or much exterior work. I'll tell you what it does have, though: neanderthal gender politics!

You know what's funny? Watching this episode and remembering how, back in the day, when we would suggest to our Trekkie brethren that the show might be slightly tainted with sexism, they used to argue with us. They would _argue!_ As if it were a debatable proposition! And we would feel like we had to defend our position!

Well, "The Man-Trap" is there to tell us: This show was not tainted with sexism. It oozed sexism from every pore. The whole universe was built on a conception of gender difference which had barely crawled out of the protozoic slime.

**The Summary:** Briefly, in "The Man-Trap" (written by George Clayton-Johnson; I'm gonna start keeping track), Kirk, Bones, and crewman Darnell (always a bad sign when your first name is "crewman") beam down to a hot dry planet to perform a routine health screening on an archaeologist named Professor Crater and his wife Nancy, who happens to be an old flame of Dr. McCoy's. It is established early that the being introduced as Nancy Crater manifests as a different person to each of the three visitors; McCoy sees Nancy as she was 10 years ago, Kirk sees Nancy as she would be at 35 (interestingly, the 35 year old Nancy has a fair amount of gray hair), and Crewman sees a blonde bombshell who reminds him of a different girl HE left behind. (So, basically, she's a lurer. But I digress.) Professor Crater seems oddly defensive and keeps telling everyone to go away. Well, 'Nancy Crater' lures poor Crewman away from the shelter; he is later discovered dead on a ledge with strange round sucker-shaped red rings all over his face. Bones ultimately discovers that he died of salt depletion, and so begins the hunt for the cause of death. Naturally it turns out that the real Nancy Crater is dead and the thing Professor Crater appears to be married to is a salt-sucking vampire who presents to its victims as some person they had the hots for long ago. It takes the Enterprise crew a while to figure this out, of course, resulting in several more deaths before Bones finally has to fire on what looks like his long-lost love, only to see her turn into a disgusting lamprey-faced hag with sucker fingers after her death.

OK, so, here's what I mean about the foundational sexism:

1) Well, the woman who drains the man's lifeblood from him in order to stay young and healthy, that's an archetype. The thing is, in purely literal terms, this creature is not a "man-trap." It goes after prey of either gender and it gets pretty close to both Yeoman Rand and Lieutenant Uhura. What makes it a "man-trap" is two things. One: like so many later _Star Trek_ monsters, it becomes the fantasy woman of any man who looks at it. Funny how often this premise continues to find its way into a plot even as late as Next Generation. Two: in addition to salt, it later transpires, this creature "also needs love." So it won't just kill you...it will demand FEELINGS from you. What a nightmare!

The demand for feelings, unlike the demand for salt, appears to be gender-specific. It emerges for the first time during a scene with Bones in his quarters, in which the creature (as Nancy) talks about how it likes Bones's feelings better cause they're so much stronger.

2) So I mentioned Uhura and Rand.

Rand is quite clearly offered up as bait for the male viewers. Not only is she wearing the infamous miniskirt and gogo boots, not only does she have the infamous beehive hairdo, but her job, at least in this episode, appears to be to carrying trays of food to the officers. The creature is attracted to Rand initially because she's carrying a tray with Sulu's lunch on it which includes a shaker full of table salt. So basically, she's a stewardess. (Later, on the bridge, Kirk is for no apparent reason giving his dialogue while munching on some sort of alien vegetable snacks created by the prop department. Before leaving, he puts the dish down on a tray being held up by another red miniskirted female yeoman, without looking at her or speaking to her, and leaves.)

Disguised as a male ensign, the creature follows Rand into the botany lab, where Sulu is enthroned amongst a bevy of futuristic alien plants. These do not appear to have been digitally altered, by the way, and it is clear that the 'plant' about which Rand and Sulu banter so archly is actually a puppet built on a glove inside which is a clearly human hand. Anyway, after Rand brings Sulu his tray, she says hello to the puppet plant, which is sort of like a fluorescent pink venus flytrap with five pockets. She has given the plant a male nickname. Sulu says that people usually like to refer to inanimate objects as "she." Rand says that it's a him, "I can tell," and that one of these days she fully expects one of Sulu's plants to grab her. In the hallway, after she goes by, two male crewmembers stare after her and talk about how awesome it would be to have HER as their personal yeoman. She appears to accept sexual harassment as part of her job, only pausing to notice it when the person harassing her is staring at her salt shaker in a strange and alien way.

Uhura is not treated this badly. Nevertheless, the first thing they use her to do is establish Spock's comical lack of human feeling, which of course is thrown into high relief by the fact that he is conversing with "an illogical woman." (Uhura describes herself this way, though to give Nichelle Nichols credit she makes it sarcastic.) Conversation opens like this:

**SPOCK: Lieutenant, your last report contained an error in the frequency column.**

**UHURA: Mr. Spock, if I hear the word "frequency" one more time, I think I'm going to cry.**

He comments on how illogical it is for a communications officer to hate the word 'frequency.' She explains that she was just "trying to start a conversation," and then instructs him on how to flirt with her: "Why don't you tell me that I'm an attractive young woman..." etc. etc. etc. Yes, because that's the only way in which men can converse with their female colleagues...When she finally suggests he tell her how his home planet Vulcan looks at night under a full moon, he says, "Vulcan has no moon." She says, "I'm not surprised."

Watching all this I thought to myself: Whatever there was that was awesome about Uhura, Nichelle Nichols owns it, because none of it was comin' from the writers. She managed to make that conversation watchable by playing this flirtation as a joke that she knows Spock isn't going to get, and then leaving him wondering without explaining the punchline.

Anyhow, so that was "The Man-Trap." I can't wait to see what the CGI people did with "Cat's Paw."


	2. CHARLIE X

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first of many Omnipotent Child episodes turns out to be more interesting than I remembered, largely because--oddly enough--of the shortlived, soon-forgotten, never-to-my-mind-hot, yet unexpectedly fascinating Yeoman Janice Rand.

**STARDATE: May 24, 2011**  
 **EPISODE #2: CHARLIE X**  
 **WRITTEN BY: D. C. Fontana from a story by Gene Roddenberry**

  
Now this was interesting.

Based on my first few viewings of this during my own adolescence, I always assumed this episode was about the terror that is the teen. It’s now clear to me that actually, this episode is about sexual harassment.

All right, that would be a little reductive. Nevertheless, “Charlie X” gets a lot more interesting once you realize that the key to the whole episode is a line Kirk says to Charlie during one of their man-to-man chats: “There’s nothing wrong with you that hasn’t gone wrong with every human male since the model was invented.” The problem with Charlie isn’t just that he’s a teenager with superpowers. What really kicks the episode into crisis mode is the fact that Charlie is struggling with the same thing the grownup human men involved here—including Kirk and Gene Roddenberry—are all still grappling with: learning how to interact with women as something other than sex objects.

 **The summary:** A seventeen year old boy is discovered living alone on an apparently uninhabited planet, the sole survivor of a spacecraft that crashed there fourteen years earlier. He’s picked up by a space probe called the Antares and ferried to the Enterprise, where he’s supposed to be taken to the colony containing his closest living relatives. As soon as he shows up, the hints begin about Charlie’s paranormal powers. The Antares crew is about to “warn” Kirk about something when their ship suddenly disintegrates. During a sparring session with Kirk in the ship’s gym, Charlie makes a guy who’s laughing at him disappear. Charlie goes on terrorizing the crew until he takes control of the ship. Kirk, suspecting that Charlie is overextended, tries to goad him into a confrontation so that McCoy can tranquilize him while he’s distracted. Just as Kirk is about to punch Charlie’s lights out, the inhabitants of Charlie’s ‘home’ planet show up in a green glowing spaceship. The giant transparent rippling green glowing head of an old white guy appears on the bridge of the Enterprise, looking much like the Great and Powerful Oz, and explains that they gave Charlie his powers so that he could survive and have now come to take him back. Charlie begs the crew to let him stay, promising to be good. Kirk makes a token attempt to convince the Phacians (Phasians? Whatever) to let him stay; but the green glowing patriarch’s head says that either Charlie would destroy them or they’d have to destroy him, and by the look on everyone’s faces during the numerous closeups of them looking on in stricken silence, it appears they all feel that the green glowing patriarch’s head has a point. Charlie is disappeared; the ship is returned by the Phacians to the status quo ante, and Uhura and Yeoman Rand cry, as Kirk reassures Rand that “it’s all over.” **END SUMMARY**

There’s a lot I’d forgotten about this episode, including the fact that Uhura has a musical number, accompanied by Spock on the Vulcan harp, which I think is supposed to be improvised. What struck me this time around, however, was the fact that the plot is really driven by Charlie’s obsession with Yeoman Rand. He develops a crush on her the moment he meets her, and expresses this by slapping her on the ass as she’s walking away. She chastises him, though she is unable or unwilling to actually name the deed for which she is rebuking him. Instead she tells him to talk to Kirk or McCoy, who will explain to him why he did what he did and why it was wrong. Kirk, however, is comically unable to explain to Charlie either why men slap women on the ass or why it is wrong. The best he can do on the first question is, “There are things you can do with a woman…” and the best he can do on the second is, “There’s no right way to hit a woman. Man to man, that’s different.”

What’s revealed in this bit of banter is something which Fontana and Roddenberry will try to paper over later in the episode: though Kirk is the show’s embodiment of heroic masculinity, he’s not much further along in terms of understanding gender equality than Charlie is. Kirk has grasped the fact that it is not acceptable to slap the asses of his female crewmembers; but he can't explain why because he has no understanding of the theory behind this rule. This is what I meant about the Trek worldmakers wanting to represent gender equality but having no idea what it would look like.

They are clearly thinking about the treatment of women in the workplace, because there’s a later scene in which Rand talks to Kirk about Charlie’s behavior and asks him to intervene. Initially dismissive, Kirk changes his tune only once Rand explains that if she has to deal with herself, it will be hurtful to Charlie. This leads to another conversation with Charlie about how to deal with women, during which Kirk—with touching earnestness—tells Charlie that the right thing to do is to “go slow,” to “be gentle,” not to “press,” et cetera. It’s not until about halfway into this speech that it occurs to him to bring up the fact that the woman’s feelings have to be taken into account. When Kirk finally tells Charlie flat-out that Rand is one of the “million things” in the world that “you can’t have" and that he has to accept this and move on, Charlie insinuiates that Kirk himself doesn’t live by these rules. Kirk says he does; but of course Kirk is in fact created for the purpose of living out the same fantasies that are driving Charlie crazy.

Kirk’s idea about how to help Charlie cope with his hormones is to teach him how to fight. Taken together with that first conversation about how there’s no right way to hit a woman, this scene is an interesting little window into the mind of the 60s male, in which sexuality and aggression are understood to come from the same place and to be nearly interchangeable—since satisfying one urge apparently defuses the other. The funniest thing about this scene is that what Kirk is “teaching” Charlie about fighting is actually a bunch of tricks that Shatner has learned in order to simulate physical combat without getting hurt. I will certainly look out for these moves in future fight scenes, especially the “shoulder roll.”

Anyway, what gets us to the denouement is Charlie’s unannounced visit to Rand’s quarters, where—naturally!—she has let her hair down (as far as it can go in that beehive) and is wearing a one-shoulder pink chiffon concoction which may be supposed to be a nightgown. Here, the subtext gets more intense, since Rand is not just defending herself against harassment, but against the threat of rape implicit in Charlie's invasion of her space. She tells him not to come without knocking; he says, "Don't lock your door on me, Janice;" she says "I'll lock it when I please." She may or may not know at this point that he has superpowers; but she's scared either way. She surreptitiously opens an intercom which broadcasts their dialogue to the bridge. Kirk hauls ass down to Janice's quarters, but can't convince Charlie to desist. Janice finally slaps Charlie, at which point, of course, she gets wished into the cornfield.

Speaking of wishing people into the cornfield, this episode is clearly indebted to the 1961 _Twilight Zone_ episode "It's a Good Life," about a small town terrorized by a boy with superpowers. In the TZ episode he's six years old, though, so that episode is saved from becoming an allegory about male sexuality...unlike "Charlie X."

The whole thing maps onto Freud so easily one almost feels guilty doing it: masculinity is split here, with Charlie representing the uncontrollable death-drive type id instincts and Kirk, the "strong father figure," functioning as the superego; as always, the anxiety is that the superego is no match for the id's powerful drives. Through Charlie, Roddenberry and Fontana rescue Kirk from the implications of some of his own character traits; he gets to be the wiser, older, more self-controlled, more enlightened and chivalrous manly man while Charlie incorporates the aspects of masculinity which cannot be recuperated. But the episode also reveals that this split isn't actually as drastic as it should be. Kirk and Charlie have more in common than either wants to acknowledge, and Charlie is only doing what all the adult men around him *would* be doing if they hadn't been 'civilized.' And this is perhaps why Kirk is not allowed to get things under control--he hsa to rely on the help of a kind of super-super-ego, the disembodied immaterial giant head which represents all the intellectual and cultural power of ,masculinity but which has refined that troublesome male body and its desires right out of existence.

By the way, it should be noted that at least in both of these episodes, Spock's ability to be "logical" where a human wouldn't be seems to manifest at this point primarily as an immunity to lust. Which is perhaps why Charlie X takes such delight in tormenting Spock (including forcing him to recite from William Blake's poem "The Tyger" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven").

Ah well. Next up, "Where No Man has Gone Before."


	3. WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The third episode broadcast was the second pilot filmed (after "The Cage" flopped and Roddenberry went back to the drawing board). Many, many inconsitencies with the other series episodes; but they were working to an insane production schedule (they used to average six days an episode; somewhere in the middle of Season 2 it went down to five and a fraction) and they used basically everything they could in the first season--including, infamously, much of "The Cage," which becomes part of "The Menagerie." The pilot is notable for many things, including the fact that the female guest star wears pants instead of a miniskirt.

**STARDATE: May 26, 2011**

  
**WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE**   
**Written by: Samuel A. Peeples**

Everything’s relative. After subjecting myself to “The Man-Trap” and “Charlie X,” I found this episode positively enlightened.

I think the reason I forgot this episode so completely had to do with its being a pilot. Naïve as I was in my youth about how television got made, I could still tell there was something not quite right about this one. Apart from the weird ugly ribbed necks on the ill-fitting Starfleet uniforms (except for Dr. Dehner’s, which had a bit of a drape) and Kirk’s eternal bad hair day and WHOA! SPOCK’S EYEBROWS! SWEET MOTHER OF GOD!

Excuse me. Getting a grip now.

I say, apart from all of this and the lack of McCoy and Uhura, I think the tape itself was just in bad shape—I remember the color as particularly washed out. Not so in the new shiny version, where everything is pristine and Technicolor and whatnot with added faux digital sharpness.

Spoilers behind cut tag:

**The summary:** The _Enterprise,_ as it approaches the edge of the galaxy, beams aboard a battered old ship’s log from the Valiant, which disappeared round these parts about 200 years earlier. From the “tapes” recovered in this recorder (in the future, we’re all going back to videotape) it appears that before the captain of the Valiant gave the order to blow up his own ship, everyone was desperately searching for information about ESP in humans. As the Enterprise goes through the barrier (digitally recreated, of course), it encounters some sort of force which causes the consoles to short out and catch fire (in the future, there are no fire extinguishers), damages the warp engines (Scottie is introduced in this episode; he appears to be around in the other two but you barely see him), and irradiates with some kind of charge one Gary Mitchell, a helmsman who’s an old friend of Kirk’s, and one Elizabeth Dehner, a psychiatrist on board to study the crew’s “emotional reactions.” Dr. Dehner appears to recover, but Mitchell has glowing eyes, an effect created by what looks like contact lenses. Mitchell develops superpowers at an alarming clip along with the mandatory delusions of godhood. (One of the first superpowers to manifest itself is speed-reading. In the future, everyone will do all their reading on microfiche.) Spock talks Kirk into marooning Mitchell on a deserted ore mining station before he becomes too powerful to stop. Mitchell escapes—joined by the now glowing-eyed Dehner, who is developing the same powers. Kirk sends everyone back to the ship and remains behind to hunt down Mitchell with an unbelievably ridiculous photon “rifle.” Mitchell, of course, knows that Kirk is coming, and sends Dehner out to meet him. Kirk convinces Dehner to help him kill Mitchell; and after a hilarious fight scene involving a ripped shirt, an open grave complete with headstone, and a number of shoulder rolls, Kirk succeeds in burying  
Mitchell alive under a piece of painted Styrofoam, excuse me, under a ton of rock. Dehner dies apologizing for having been tempted by being “almost like a god.” Kirk beams back to the ship, issues posthumous commendations for Dehner and Mitchell, and, upon Spock’s mentioning that he “felt for [Mitchell] too,” observes that there’s “hope for you yet, Mr. Spock.” (What I wouldn’t give to see Spock respond to one of these cracks with a hearty “Hey, fuck you!”) **END SUMMARY**  


  
From a philosophical standpoint the most interesting thing about this episode is all the anxiety about the intrinsic value of humanity. This anxiety is always a subtext of Kirk’s interactions with Spock, of course; but it’s also the main meat of the plot, since Mitchell and Dehner are “mutants” whose powers will, if left unchecked, render humanity obsolete. Kirk is put in the position of having to defend humanity as something which matters and which has a right to exist. “Earth is not important,” says Dehner; and since all nightmares are also fantasies, one can’t help thinking that at the most nervewracking point of the nuclear age there was something both terrifying and comforting about the idea that maybe Earth wasn’t. That maybe if the planet did wind up getting blown up and millions of human beings were incinerated and poisoned, something like human life as we know it would still go on somewhere else—better, smarter, and more powerful, but still in a human shape.

From a gender standpoint, well, on board the ship, the struggle continues. The bridge crew is encumbered by the gratuitous “Yeoman Smith,” a cute blonde chick who has one line (she corrects Kirk when he gets her name wrong) and whose job is to stand behind the men’s chairs and look pretty. Oh no, I’m wrong—her other job is to allow Mitchell to hold her hand while the ship is going through its turbulence. Mitchell, who is established as Kirk’s partner in womanizing, also tries to flirt with Dr. Dehner during her first appearance on the bridge. But Dehner is a Hitchcockian rather than a Monrovian blonde: cool, elegant, and untouchable. She’s nearly as tall as some of the men she’s working with; and after those first two episodes, this one reminds you why women fought for the right to wear pants. It’s unbelievable how much _not_ wearing a miniskirt helps in terms of giving Dr. Dehner some dignity. She shoots down Mitchell immediately; he responds by calling her a “walking freezer unit.” Later, in sickbay, Mitchell apologizes for this crack; she says that “women professionals do tend to overcompensate.” So here at least we have a) a woman professional (who is a doctor, rather than a telephone operator or stewardess) and b) someone whose ass not even Charlie X would dare slap. Which is a step up, even if the main reason she’s unslappable is that the men are afraid of getting freezer burn.

Naturally, of course, her cool exterior has to be revealed as a front concealing the fires of her smoldering passion; and naturally, the object of this passion is precisely the guy she refused to flirt with ten minutes earlier. This happens during a scene in sickbay, but fortunately they’re interrupted before things get too emetic. Once Dehner develops Glowing Eyeballs Syndrome, it’s a foregone conclusion that she and Mitchell will join forces as partners and, presumably, lovers.

But down on the ore processing station, things get interesting. Mitchell is the one doing most of the godlike things, including creating a fertile garden in the middle of a barren wasteland (for you _Paradise Lost_ fans out there, he is what, making a heaven of hell). But he does tell Dehner that she will become a “god”—not, significantly, a goddess, but a full-fledged god with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto. Regardless, he then tries to shove her into the Eve role by bringing her into this new Eden and then creating an apple tree for her to eat from. She doesn’t say this, of course, but I’m hearin’ it: “Hey, I signed up for the god gig. Get the hell away from me with this ‘helpmeet’ bullshit.” When Mitchell tries to coerce Kirk into praying to him, Kirk replies, “Not to both of you?” Kirk’s last gambit is to insinuate that Mitchell will not allow the existence of an equally powerful female counterpart: “Eventually there will only be one. One jealous god!” (The “jealous God” thing of course marks Mitchell as an Old Testamenty smitin’ kind of a god, just as Kirk’s plea that “above all else, a god needs compassion” suggests the superiority of Christianity’s God 2.0, Now With More Mercy.) It is thus possible that the real reason Dehner joins forces with Kirk is that he convinces her that she can ‘join’ Mitchell only so long as she’s his subordinate. So Dehner declines to become the new Eve, and instead blasts the living daylights out of the guy who keeps acting like he’s her Creator. Which I have to say I kind of like.

The other very interesting thing is that when Kirk is reduced to begging Dehner for her help, he appeals to her not as a woman, but as a psychiatrist. It would have been so easy to go the other way, and appeal to her ‘natural’ feminine compassion for the human beings who will suffer if Mitchell is allowed to survive. But instead, Kirk appeals to her professional knowledge of just how fucked up human beings really are. He asks her to “be a psychiatrist, for just a moment longer” and think about what the “prognosis” would be for someone who has godlike powers but is still emotionally and psychologically human. Paradoxically, Dehner agrees to save humanity and take Mitchell out not because she believes in the goodness of humanity, but because her scientific training has convinced her of its essential badness.

So in the midst of all this dross—Dehner has to die, of course, because the show can’t handle a female god any more than Mitchell could, because ambitious women are trouble, and because a professional woman who wears pants and doesn’t flirt with smarmy male colleagues is apparently too much to ask for from 1966—here is one tiny sparkling nugget of gold: Kirk, at a moment of extreme stress, recognizes Dehner as a professional. He also shows enough self-awareness about the sexism that he shares with Mitchell to use it against him. The casting of Kellerman and her pants could be seen as another little nugget, though it should be noted that once she has her glowing eyes she looks very much like a department store mannequin, and that while she’s flat on her stomach during the big fight at the end, she holds her hands an inch or so off the dirt in this very awkward way which makes it look like she’s trying not to ruin her manicure.

Next up…"The Naked Time."


	4. THE NAKED TIME

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And now it gets weird. "The Naked Time" was reprised in the Next Generation episode "The Naked Now," and is also the template for untold numbers of "space madness" episodes that followed it in other TV shows and films. Based on the featurettes that came with the remastered DVD release, I actually believe that John F. Black's wife Rosemary, who appeared in the featurette with him but seemed very irritated most of the time, made some significant and unacknowledged contributions to this episode. I base this mainly on the fact that she seemed to be much more aware of and able to talk about what was really interesting about this episode, while John F. Black mainly kept saying, "And it's like the whole crew is drunk!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this review I credit writer/producer John F. Black for having a clue about racial sensitivity. As will be discussed in a later review, it turns out I was giving him way too much credit, and that what I'm commenting on was actually suggested by George Takei. Nimoy is also on record about his own contributions to the episode (mainly to what happens after Spock catches The Bug). This is an early but by no means isolated example of the actors makign this show better than it would have been. Basically, at this point in production, the actors had a much better handle on their characters than the writers or producers did, and their contribution to the shape of the early show ought to be more widely appreciated.

**STARDATE: June 3, 2011**

  
**THE NAKED TIME**  
 **Written by: John F. Black**

I have to say, when I found out "Naked Time" was up next, I thought to myself, "Wasn't it a little early in the life of the series for the writers to be smoking that crack?"

But in fact, it wasn't a bad move; the viewers get to see the Great Repressed Inner Workings of the major players early in the game, thus enabling said viewers to entertain themselves by doing their own psychoanalysis on the characters during slow times in future episodes.

This is an episode that clearly made an impression on me, though my memory of the actual plot was sketchy. What I remembered best, apart from Riley crooning "I'll Take You Home Again, Cathleen" into the ship's PA system, was the creepy rattlesnake's tail sound effect used to mark the passage of the 'disease' from person to person. That's Trek at its best: Crude, yet effective. (At its worst, you get crude, yet unintentionally hilarious. "The Naked Time" spans the continuum.)

**The summary:** The Enterprise has to pick up six people stationed on a frozen ice planet which is about to break up; the Enterprise's remit includes scientific observation of the planet's self-destruction, which requires them to maintain a dangerously tight orbit around the unstable planet while it breaks up. It is important to the plot that the Enterprise will burn up in the planet's atmosphere (in the future, there is no such thing as a space shuttle). Spock and a life sciences grunt named Tormolen (or, as I shall call him, Joey the Blueshirt) beam down to the station in red plastic ice suits complete with beekeeper helmets which are clearly not attached to the necks of the suits and therefore would be nearly useless as protection against extreme cold. You know it's an ice planet because everything in the station--including the dead bodies of all the station personnel--is covered with spray-on white foam simulating frost. You sure wouldn't know it from Joey the Blueshirt, who completely fails to behave as if anything in his environment is cold. He takes off his red rubber glove to scratch his nose, then puts his bare hand on the side of a frozen console, thus exposing himself to a few drops of something red which, defying gravity, flow sideways in order to land on his fingers. Though this planet is SO COLD SO VERY COLD that as soon as the life support system on the station was compromised everyone in it froze to death, Joey the Redshirt feels quite comfortable resting his bare hand against an ice-encrusted metal table, and when he removes it, he doesn't lose any hunks of skin.

Anyway, those whom the ice planet destroys, it first makes mad; one woman has been strangled, the engineer appears to have died of apathy, and for some reason, everyone on the Enterprise seems most impressed by the terrifying detail that one of them died while TAKING A SHOWER FULLY CLOTHED!!!!11!!! Anyway, the crazy plague comes back to the Enterprise with Joey the Blueshirt. Strangely enough, Joey's first symptom is beginning to question authority, and indeed to question the ethical basis of Starfleet's mission. He is working his way toward a critique of Starfleet imperialism when all of a sudden he grabs a butter knife and threatens Sulu and his buddy Riley with it. While struggling to wrest this lethally dull butter knife from his grasp, Sulu and Riley catch the crazy plague, and we're off. It spreads like this:

SULU  
PRIMARY SYMPTOMS: Swashbuckling; aversion to wearing a shirt; gleamingly oiled chest  
TRANSMITS IT TO: apparently, no one

RILEY  
PRIMARY SYMPTOMS: Becoming an Irish stereotype; mutiny; flirting; shutting off the ship's engines; crooning  
TRANSMITS IT TO: Nurse Chapel

CHAPEL:  
PRIMARY SYMPTOMS: Acting tranquilized; staring at herself in the mirror; declaring her love to an extremely uncomfortable Spock  
TRANSMITS IT TO: Spock

SPOCK:  
PRIMARY SYMPTOMS: Sudden fits of weeping; talking about how he could never tell his mother he loved her  
TRANSMITS IT TO: Kirk

KIRK:  
GETS IT FROM: Spock  
PRIMARY SYMPTOMS: Revealing a creepy psychosexual obsession with the Enterprise as some kind of harpy bitch vampire lover who is also an all-consuming mother and who knows maybe a vagina dentata as well; whining about how this obsession with the feminine symbolic prevents him from putting the moves on his "beautiful yeoman"

Meanwhile the crazy plague goes pandemic, so that by the time McCoy (mercifully unaffected) develops a "serum," most of the crew is totally doolally and, thanks to Riley and Spock, the warp engines are out of commission. The Enterprise has entered the atmosphere and is so close to incinerating itself that Scottie (also mercifully unaffected) has to blast the Enterprise out of the planet's grip using an "theoretical" method involving the antimatter drive which is supposed to create a "controlled implosion" in the engines. How all the science of that would actually work I have no idea; the purpose is to create a situation in which Kirk has to pry the necessary formula out of an increasingly hysterical Spock. Kirk's method, naturally, is to beat Spock about the face hoping to "snap him out of it." Though he slaps Spock quite a number of times, Kirk succeeds only in catching the crazy plague; but apparently the sight of his dear Jim raving about that bitch of a ship he's in love with sobers Spock up enough to come up with the formula. Kirk--presumably because his craziness manifests as an EVEN MORE INTENSE desire to protect his mother/lover/castrating succubus--is able to pull himself together long enough to get the job done. McCoy meanwhile has discovered that the plague is actually carried by a chemically altered form of water which is transmitted through perspiration, made himself a serum, and cured Sulu with it. He zots Kirk with this serum as he enters the bridge, curiously feeling a need to tear off a shoulder of Kirk's uniform tunic to do it, thus making us 1 for 2 so far in terms of episodes in which Kirk's torso is partially denuded. The implosion does work; it also somehow sends the Enterprise three days back in time. There are apparently no consequences of this apart from their having an extra three days in their lives. **END SUMMARY  
**  


I think actually that instead of "The Naked Time," this episode should be called "The Sulu Slash Factory." OK, so, first Riley complains about how Sulu is always trying to get him interested in Sulu's own hobbies; then, Sulu's first crazy plague symptom is to try to decoy Riley down to the gym for a "light workout;" then we have him parading through the corridors stripped to the waist, oiled like a Spartan wrestler, and waving his substitute phallus at everyone from the maintenance staff to Kirk himself. It's writin' itself at this point. I might also point out that in the Kirk/Spock confrontation in the briefing room, Spock is feminized by his hysterical symptoms, and Kirk goes along with this by slapping his face rather than punching his lights out.

But there are a number of things that are pulled off in this episode (apart from Sulu's shirt) that finally give you a glimpse of this show's potential. Most important is the infusion of comedy which makes the Very Emotional Acting of the Very Serious Drama bearable. It's not that the comedy is that subtle; but giving the characters the capacity to appreciate the absurdity of the situation helps you believe in them when the Time To Emote rolls around. I particularly appreciate the emergence of Snarky Spock, who not only zings McCoy back for the first of many "green blood" cracks but, having Vulcan neck-pinched the rapier-brandishing Sulu, dryly orders security to "take D'Artagnan here to sick bay." Kirk, while Tormented as usual, is also just plain irritated by Riley's antics; the real problem, of course, is that Riley has barricaded himself into the engine control room and disabled the warp drives, but the fact that he's also singing "I'll Take You Home Again, Cathleen" in an endless repeating loop at the top of his lungs is _nearly_ as grating on Kirk's nerves (as Riley announces yet another rendition, Kirk murmurs pleadingly to no one in particular, "Please. Not again"). Even Uhura is given a punch line--when Sulu swears to "defend you, fair maiden," she says, "Sorry, neither."

Another thing I appreciate about this episode is the effor Black put into making the more stereotypical crazy plague symptoms psychological rather than racial. Sulu's fascination with swords, for instance, is something which could easily present itself as some kind of resurfacing of his warlike Japanese essence--and that's how it worked in that _Twilight Zone_ episode Takei featured in. But by giving Sulu a specific cultural context for his "swashbuckling" fantasies--he raves about Richlieu, and is clearly acting out his own private _Three Musketeers_ \--Black makes it an expression of personality rather than biology, just as the unbelievably obnoxious Oirish traits that Riley develops are attributed by Spock to his "fancying himself the descendant of Irish kings" rather than to whatever biological Irishness his DNA might contain. I wondered why, as long as Riley had turned into a character from _The Quiet Man_ , they didn't solve the problem by offering him a bottle of Jameson's and then letting him drink it till he passed out.

While I'm on the subject of Riley I should point out that post-plague he becomes the center of sexism in this universe: in addition to patronizingly commenting about Spock's putting "the women" to work, he announces over the intercom that from now on female crewmembers will "wear their hair loose about their shoulders" and then starts rambling about how they shouldn't use so much makeup. Sure, blame it all on the Irish.

Anyway. There is also some good interpersonal stuff, including a nice little bit between Kirk and Uhura when he brusquely tells her to cut Riley off, she yells back, "Don't you think that if I could, I would?" and then they both apologize to each other. I should also point out that apparently both Uhura and Yeoman Rand are trained navigators, because both wind up having to take the helm after the men go crazy. I also find it interesting that as Number One, Majel Barrett was a brunette, whereas as Nurse Chapel, she is not only blonde, but an egregiously hideous platinum/ash shade (her hair doesn't look like hair so much as the pelt of some kind of winter-dwelling rodent which has been used as a hearthrug before being transformed into a toupee).

This is also the first of the "ticking time bomb" plots based on a countdown to the destruction of the ship itself. Hackneyed as it would become, it's undeniably effective in terms of increasing the tension and raising the stakes. We see the first beginnings of technobabble--Black was a producer as well as a writer, so maybe he's put more thought into how shit works--and there's also more of an effort to use the sets to heighten the action (as more crewmembers go nuts, crazy messages turned up scrawled on the walls, etc.).

The crazy plague itself, scientifically speaking, is a mess. How exactly does a water-based plague spread itself on an ice planet? Now, with Joey the Blueshirt you can understand it, since he's fool enough to warm up the frost with his body heat; but presuming that the crew on the station weren't dumb enough to do that, how did they catch it? It's spread through perspiration; but we don't know whether it's a virus or bacterium or just a chemically altered form of water (the latter would seem to be most likely since McCoy says it acts like alcohol). But, of course, nobody cares; the point is to get the whole crew high so all hell can break loose.

Also grievously mishandled is the throwaway "time travel" thing, introduced presumably in order to open the door for later time travel episodes. Though they have gone 3 days back in time, there appears to be no impact on the timeline itself: planet is still blown up, plague is still cured, everything that happened in the past 3 days actually happened. About the only thing that changes is that the ship's chronometers run backwards for a while.

Spock, interestingly enough, appears to be able to cure himself before getting the serum. Just as interestingly, it is hard to tell exactly when Kirk gets the crazy plague--with everyone else it's marked by the sound effect and by the victim staring at his sweaty palm--and it's also hard to tell when he's recovered from it. After McCoy zots him, Kirk's emotional affect doesn't change much; and he stares wistfully at Yeoman Rand while murmuring sadly, "No sandy beach..." This is a callback to his crazy plague fantasy of walking along a beach with a real live girl; so once again, Crazy Plague Kirk is not that different from Sane Kirk.

Well, the Duality That Is Masculinity will be on display again in our next episode, "The Enemy Within." Yee ha.


	5. THE ENEMY WITHIN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another duality-of-man episode, this time taken deadly seriously. The rewatch of this was a real eye-opener--once again, unexpectedly, because of what happens with Yeoman Janice Rand. Trigger warning: Because this episode includes an attempted rape, there is some discussion of sexual assault and the crazy way in which the writer shows the TOS officers handling it.

**STARDATE: June 7, 2011**

  
**THE ENEMY WITHIN**   
**Written by: Richard Matheson**

Richard Matheson was one of the main writers for _The Twilight Zone_ ; while looking up his contributions I discovered that George Clayton Johnson, author of the notorious "Man-Trap," also wrote for TZ. One of Shatner's TZ episodes, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," was written by  
Matheson. (I actually like Shatner's other TZ episode, "Nick of Time," better; but in terms of scenery chewing, you cannot beat Shatner's Descent Into Madness in "Nightmare.") Such a small, cozy world it must have been out there in TVland.

Anyway, it was very interesting watching this as a grown-up, because while in some ways I am very aware now of how it affected me, in some ways, I still wonder what it meant that I was watching all this during my callow teenage years. But anyway, here we go, cut tag for spoilers...

**The summary:** Kirk, Sulu, and a bunch of crew members are down on a desert planet collecting specimens (why the captain needs to accompany every goddamned landing party that beams down to any planet for any reason whatsoever...but I digress). The most interesting "specimen" is a Pomeranian dressed up as a Martian rainbow-haired unicorn. Seriously, some poor dog has been zipped into a multicolored polyester fur suit complete with central horn and TV-like antennae, and in the opening shot Sulu is holding it and gazing into space thinking God knows what. It is mentioned in passing that at night, it gets down to 120 below zero on this planet. Geologist Fisher slides down a hill and gets himself covered with yellow dust; they send him up to the ship to  go to sickbay. Scott notices something a little wonky about the transporter. Then Kirk is beamed up. It takes extra-long and he feels a little woozy. Scott helps him out into the corridor; while he's gone, the transporter, of its own accord, beams up another guy who looks just like Captain Kirk--that is, until he turns around and you  see his evil little eyes darting furtively from side to side. Kirk's captain's log voiceover explains for the viewers who were out getting a snack during the prologue and credits that this guy is his "strange alter ego," created by a transporter malfunction.

Of course nobody knows this at the time, so when Evil Kirk staggers into sickbay, angrily demands a flask of Saurian brandy, and then staggers back out with it, McCoy figures Kirk is just having a hard morning. He does,  however, send Spock to Kirk's quarters to check up on him. When Spock shows up Good Kirk is bare-chested with a towel draped around his neck, thus pushing the Kirk's Denuded Torso Ratio up to 3 out of 5. Scott calls them down to the transporter room to tell them that the  rainbow-haired martian unicorn dog they beamed up has been split by the transporter into two rainbow-haired martian unicorn dogs, one gentle and the other "some kind of savage vicious opposite." (Hey, if I had to act in that martian unicorn suit, I'd be savage and vicious too.) By this time Evil Kirk has insinuated himself into Yeoman Rand's quarters. He tells her she's "too beautiful to ignore," that she's "too much woman," and that it's time to stop "pretending" they don't have feelings for each other. Then he assaults her, which makes this now 4 out of 5 episodes in which Rand is stalked, harassed, or sexually assaulted (this does not happen in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" only because she does not appear there). During the struggle she scratches his face and manages to get the doors open; Geologist Fisher, who happens to be passing by and who is already making the union speaking part rate, runs to alert Mr. Spock (cause that's what Rand tells him to do; who knows, maybe Spock's the only guy on the ship who's never harassed her) and gets beaten up by Evil Kirk, who then runs back to Kirk's quarters to literally lick his wounds. Good Kirk is of course totally baffled when he hears what Evil Kirk's been up to; when he points out to Rand that he has no scratches on his face, Spock concludes that Kirk has been duplicated just like the martian pomeranian (a possibility that arguably should have occurred to Spock the moment they found out abotu Evil Martian Unicorn Pomeranian, but whatever). While the hunt is on for Evil Kirk--the crew have been told only that there's an "impostor" on board--the temperatures on the planet are dropping, but Sulu and the landing party remain stranded until the transporter is fixed. Sulu provides comic relief by wisecracking for a while, but is eventually reduced to muttering "can't.... hold on...much...lon....ger...." through frost-dusted lips. Complicating matters is the fact that Good Kirk seems to have lost his ability to make decisions and seems rather vague and preoccupied all the time. Good Kirk and Spock finally corner Evil Kirk in the engineering decks, but not before Evil Kirk blasts out what turns out to be a vital part of the transporter system, further screwing Sulu and company. While Evil Kirk is restrained in sickbay, Scotty and Spock experiment with reintegrating the good and evil martian unicorn dogs; the operation is a success but the dog dies. Spock thinks the problem was that the dog didn't understand what was happening to it, and that Kirk will be able to pull through. McCoy thinks Spock has lost his pointy green mind. Good Kirk agonizes about whether to take the risk, then finally decides to; unfortunately Good  Kirk is naive enough to trust Evil Kirk, and Evil Kirk is soon running amok once more. Evil Kirk makes it to the bridge; Good Kirk shows up and there is a Kirk vs. Kirk showdown during which Shatner nearly puts himself in the Royal Hospital for Overacting. Evil Kirk finally submits, the Kirks head to the transporter room, they are sent through the transporter, and a single Kirk materializes, showing he's all back and badass with a snappy, "Get those men out of there!" (The question of why the rescue of the landing party had to be delayed until they had done Kirk's reintegration is conveniently swept aside.) Sulu and the crewsicles are recovered and thawed out; Kirk gets back on the bridge. Yeoman Rand tells Kirk that she knows what was going on with Evil Kirk and it looks as if she's maybe about to try to set up a date or something when Kirk curtly dismisses her. Spock says, "The impostor had some...interesting qualities, didn't he, Yeoman Rand?" and she gives Spock a dirty look. **END SUMMARY**  


 

What? WHAT? You're gonna end with THAT?!

OK, let me back up.

Unlike "The Naked Time," this episode has no sense of humor about itself, unless you count the martian unicorn rainbow-haired dog. Evil Kirk is disturbing and Good Kirk is disturbed. Asked how he's feeling after the reintegration, Kirk replies, "How do you think I feel? I've just seen a part of myself that no man should ever see." The whole team is working on making this exploration of the Duality of Man (and, as I will soon explain, it is most definitely the Duality of MAN) as dark and creepy as it can possibly be. Good Kirk's PA announcement tells everyone they can tell the impostor apart by the scratches on his face. The impostor, hearing this announcement, promptly covers them up with some of Rand's makeup (in the future, Maybelline will make an AWESOME concealer as well as a base that automatically changes color to match the skin tone of the person who applies it). But there are still many ways to tell the two Kirks apart:

* Evil Kirk is frequently lit from below. Good Kirk is often lit so that his face is half in shadow. Throughout, the lighting is symbolic rather than realistic. In one shot there's the latticed shadow of a window frame hanging over Good Kirk. Windowpanes? Inside a spaceship? What?

* Good Kirk looks sort of gently despondent. Evil Kirk, when not attacking, roaring, swigging brandy from the suggestively long neck of a pretty big bottle, or screaming "I'm the captain!", tends to hold himself in a posture vaguely reminiscent of Laurence Olivier's Richard III and which is presumably intended to communicate a hunted and tormented soul.

* Evil Kirk likes the taste of his own blood. Good Kirk would need to be revived with smelling salts if he bled at all.

And so on. The most Serious part of this episode, in the sense of being Deep, is Spock's speech about what this really shows us about man's good and evil side. Spock obviously has a personal interest in this topic since he has the whole Vulcan vs. Human thing going on inside him; and don't think Matheson is shy about pointing that out. Spock's analysis--and this is borne out by the plot, which shows Good Kirk becoming more ineffectual and weak as time goes on--posits that while Good Kirk has the intelligence and the compassion and judgment and whatnot, Evil Kirk's aggression is fundamental to Kirk's function as a leader. Without Evil Kirk's appetites and drives, Good Kirk can't do a simple fucking thing like get the @#$! landing party off the planet.

Now to be fair to Good Kirk, part of the responsibility for the landing party's suffering should go to Spock because the "survival procedures" he directs the crew to take are laughable. They figure out how to heat the rocks using their phasers, and that helps for a while. But they apparently can't figure out how to a) seek shelter b) huddle together for warmth or c) burn something. Each guy wraps himself in an individual very thin blanket (in the future, landing parties freezing to death will be provided only with one nylon sheet per man) and sits by himself as he congeals. Spock explains that they tried to send down thermal heaters but they replicated and malfunctioned. How about some fucking BLANKETS? Blankets don't malfunction. Or a few fuzzy sweaters, for Pete's sake?

But I digress.

As I was saying: In the abstract sense I have big problems with this argument, because it assumes that goodness is, essentially, weak. I would argue that being good actually requires a tremendous amount of strength--power of decision included--and that weakness is what leads people to become complicit in evil; but this can be endlessly debated from a philosophical point of view.

In human terms, what is far more disturbing is the clear implication that the ability to lead is inseparable from the desire to rape.

Evil Kirk does some shitty things, but the most vivid evidence given of his evilness is his assault on Janice Rand. I don't know, when I was 14 or whenever I first watched this, if I would have fully realized that this assault was an attempted rape. It's pretty clear to me now. No clothing is removed, but the choreography is  
unambiguous. He grabs her, she tries to pull away, he won't let her, he gets her down on the floor and then climbs on top of her and tries to pin her hands. It's pretty obvious what's going to happen if she can't get away from him. The scratch gives her the opportunity; but when she gets to the door, he grabs her and throws her back into the room. It must have been scary for me to watch then; it's scary for me to watch now. I wonder. How old was I able to get before I could no longer avoid learning that men rape women? Was this the first time I had seen something like this on television?

Anyway. My point is that while the plot of "Enemy Within" clearly marks rape as evil--as, perhaps, the most evil propensity that Evil Kirk has--it also makes the "lust" which is presumed to motivate rape (yes, we know it's not that simple; but Richard Matheson didn't) absolutely essential to manliness. I use the term "manliness" because Matheson's conception of masculine virtue appears to me to replicate the Victorian construct of "manliness," summed up in the concept of "strong passions strongly checked." If you don't have the strong passions, you're weak, and therefore not a man. If you can't check them, you are not in control of yourself, and therefore not a man. Good Kirk doesn't have any strong passions--sexual or otherwise. Evil Kirk has them all. Kirk can't funciton as captain without those passions. He also can't function without Good Kirk's intellect and discipline--that becomes clear during their confrontation on the bridge. But bottom line, what this tells us is that for Matheson, sexuality is part of man's evil side. Good Kirk may as well be a eunuch, and his loss of the "will to command" is a symbolic representation of that impotence. This means that while the drive to rape is regrettable--it needs to be kept in control--it is also necessary. Because without that drive, Kirk is neither a captain nor a man.

Hey, maybe this is why women don't make good leaders. Cause you know, I have a dark side...but I have to say, I don't have a strong desire to rape the people I'm attracted to. Nor do I really have a strong propensity toward violence; I don't find it rewarding. And apparently, according to this evidence, both these characterstics are foundational to leadership.

Well.

I never had a lot of time for Yeoman Rand. First of all, her alleged "beauty" continues to escape me; second, her personality is very limited and does not make an impression compared to the other principals or even to Nurse Chapel. But I would like to take a few minutes to talk about her characterization in this episode, because it's fascinating.

Following the attempt in her quarters, Yeoman Rand must have reported the assault, because the camera cuts from Evil Kirk licking the blood off his knuckles to Good Kirk turning around and saying, " _My_ yeoman said that?" (This is the first episode where there was any camera work worth paying attention to. There is a slight continuity hiccup during the fight in engineering, where you can tell that they ended one shot and then tried to start the next one in exactly the same place but couldn't.) So Kirk goes down to interview her.

So, this is the protocol for responding to sexual assault victims on the Enterprise: have the victim interviewed by her attacker, flanked by his two closest male friends (Spock and McCoy). It doesn't occur to anyone that this might be intimidating or traumatic for her. It doesn't even occur to anyone that maybe she'd feel more comfortable if there was another woman in the room. In fact, if memory serves, Uhura does not even appear in this episode, and neither does Nurse Chapel.

Despite the intimidating circumstances, she nevertheless tells the whole story. She does it while manifesting a lot of very crudely telegraphed "shame" body language. Nevertheless, when Kirk tells her it wasn't him, she refuses to back down.

Spock says at the end of this interview that the only "logical conclusion" is that there is an impostor aboard. Actually, Spock, the more "logical conclusion" is that your buddy the captain is a rapist and he is brazening through this confrontation with bold-faced lies. Lots of guys who seem like real nice people in other contexts are willing to rape a woman if the opportunity arises. Lots of these guys lie when called on it. But no, we're going with "evil transporter-created double" instead, which Occam's Razor would seem to indicate...oh, wait, I see that the plot is totally validating this crazy theory.

Spock makes this deduction because he knows about the duplication problem with the martian unicorn rainbow dog. Fine. Let us look at this interaction for a moment from the perspective of Janice Rand.

Rand doesn't know about the unicorn dog. She knows that the landing party is freezing tail because the transporters are on the fritz, but Spock specifically tells Good Kirk not to tell the crew the whole truth about what's happened to him because they can't know that he has this dark side. So Rand has no reason to suspect that some evil doppelganger of her captain and boss is roaming the Enterprise.

From Rand's perspective, what happens is this: her captain, and her immediate supervisor, stalks her, hits on her, and then tries to rape her. When she reports this, McCoy and Spock try to intimidate her into changing her story by bringing her would-be rapist down to sickbay to confront her. Nevertheless, she sticks to her story about what happened--at which point Kirk insists that it wasn't him. Spock and McCoy to take seriously what from Rand's perspective is a breathtakingly audacious lie. She can clearly hope for no sympathy from the men around her, apart from Geologist Fisher. She is apparently one of the lowest ranks they have; her job would appear to be one notch above "comfort woman." The man she's accusing is the starship's captain. They are in space. There is nowhere for her to go. She will be trapped on this ship with her would-be rapist for another four years. He refuses to acknowledge assaulting her and nobody will challenge him. She is in the most vulnerable position she could be in; and it is her word against his.

And yet, she tells the story; and she insists that it is true. And I would just like to call attention to the steel-reinforced ovaries it would have taken an actual woman in her situation to do that. I would like to call attention to this because the episode does not. The improbability of Rand's committing this heroic act, in fact, is treated by Matheson as a plot problem. If this incident never comes to light, then Spock never gets the chance to deduce the existence of the double. On the other hand, as I have indicated, the fact that Rand reports this at all, let alone sticks to her story, is extraordinary. Rather than allow Rand to be extraordinary, Matheson 'explains' her heroism by having Fisher witness the attempt, so that a) her testimony can be corroborated by someone more 'reliable' and b)Rand can be motivated by her knowledge that the incident cannot in fact be hushed up. Matheson makes her tell Kirk that she 'wouldn't have said anything' because she 'understands' that he doesn't want to 'get in trouble,' except...and she never finishes the sentence. When he insists again that it wasn't him, Rand says that "Fisher saw you," and Fisher pops out of sickbay to confirm this. The implication is that she might have let it go if there hadn't been any other witnesses.

Matheson further undercuts Rand by scripting another encounter with Evil Kirk just before he is finally  
apprehended. Evil Kirk runs into Rand on the way to a turbolift and, pretending to be the real Kirk, tells her that it was the "impostor" who attacked her and that he would like to have a chat with her sometime to talk about this. Rand seems quite charmed by this invitation.

And this is why I hate that ending so much. Rand clearly fears and hates Evil Kirk; but she responds most positively to Evil Kirk pretending to be Real Kirk; and once Real Kirk is back, Rand seems disappointed that Evil Kirk has receded. So, see, she would really have been up for a close encounter with the "impostor" and his "interesting qualities," if only he hadn't been so clumsy about, you know, attacking her. So whatever dignity Rand had left after that interview in sickbay, it's gone now.

Even the implications of the fact that Spock seems to be savoring the memory of these "interesting qualities" as well, and almost to be sharing a kind of intimate "doesn't it suck how we both have crushes on him and it's never gonna happen" moment with her, do not cheer me up.

Ah well. Next up, "Mudd's Women." "The Enemy Within" will no doubt improve retroactively.


	6. MUDD'S WOMEN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And after two fairly strong episodes comes...this one. The more insanely outrageous a plot is, the more time I spend on it in the synopsis, so this is the first of many in which the synopsis is really part of the analysis. Because this plot is bad. And not just in the ideological sense.

**STARDATE: June 11, 2011**   
**MUDD'S WOMEN**   
**Written by: Stephen Kandel from a story by Gene Roddenberry**

Dear Gene Roddenberry:

Thank you for creating Star Trek. Your franchise has given me many hours of pleasure over the years, and in addition to feeding into my rich imaginative life, it has helped create many communities to which I have been proud and happy to belong. I would also like to thank you for hiring other people to do most of the writing for Star Trek. Because apparently, when you tried to write individual episodes, TERRIBLE THINGS HAPPENED.

Sincerely,

Me

I had this episode confused in my mind with the 'sequel,' "I, Mudd." Gene loved this character so much he used him twice. Who doesn't love a balding space pirate who dresses like Errol Flynn even though he's built like George Costanza? And he's even more lovable when surrounded by a bevy of 'beautiful women!' Who he owns!

Christ almighty. 

**The Summary:**

Great steaming balls of bantha poodoo.

The summary? The summary is that this alleged 'plot' is an incoherent pile of poodoo, and I'm not even talking about the gender politics. Well, yes I am, because the gender politics are foundational to the plot and it is partly because they are so incoherent that the plot is so incoherent. Oh, by the way, before I forget: I never noticed before this episode how that "begin communication" noise they use sounds EXACTLY like a wolf whistle!

All right. Courage. Onward.

 **The Summary:** The Enterprise is pursuing a small unidentified vessel. A chase through an asteroid belt causes the small ship to blow up and the Enterprise to blow out several of its dilithium crystals. However, Scott, Spock, and McCoy are able to beam the ship's crew aboard. Said crew consists of Harry Mudd, space pirate extraordinaire, who for the moment is calling himself Leo Walsh and adopting the "Irish" accent he once used to play Captain Jack Boyle in the Rigel 17 Community Theater's production of _Juno and the Paycock_. Oh, and they also beam aboard his "cargo." This consists of three women in slinky dresses who are so hot that Scott and McCoy are literally dazed for several minutes just by the sight of them. You know they're hot because the screen is fogged, they are heavily made-up, and whenever they walk you can hear tom-toms. I mean literally, their asses have a dedicated musical theme in the soundtrack. Kirk holds a 'hearing' (made up of the Enterprise's officers, so you know it's fair) about 'Leo Walsh's" many violations of interstellar law, during which the Enterprise lie detector (in the future, all polygraphs are 100% accurate and their electronic voices are REALLY ANNOYING; I don't know whether they were using Majel Barrett for this yet but if so, she must have performed inside a meat locker to get her voice THAT tinny) humorously forces him to reveal his real name and also pulls up his interplanetary rap sheet.

The following things become clear: These women are hypnotizing the entire crew--less Spock, of course, who is immune to their effect, and of course less all the women, although actually, we don't see any women reacting to the Three Hotties, so who knows, maybe all the women drool and stare as they sashay by too and they just couldn't show that on television because God knows same sex attraction is so much more disturbing than a guy being allowed to traffic in women which apparently isn't even treated as a crime in the future and...

I'm sorry. I'll start again.

The following things become clear: Harcourt Fentin Mudd, for that is his name, is a small-time crook and smuggler who is ferrying three women to a remote colony to become the "wives" of lonely colonists. Presumably in order to increase his commission and ensure the deal is made, he is giving them "Venus drugs" which make them sooooo magically beautiful that they cause the men around them to get stupid and stare with their mouths open. When the "Venus drugs" wear off they become "ugly" again. You know they're "ugly" because they have no makeup and their wigs are mussed up. I think they may also have put on some prosthetic wrinkles but it's hard to be sure. Anyway, the Enterprise has to detour to a mining planet to restock their dilithium crystals. Mudd takes the opportunity to contact the miners directly and get the miners to force Kirk to trade the dilithium crystals for "Mudd's women" and for Mudd's freedom. Kirk doesn't want to, but the lights are starting to go out on the Enterprise (by the way, that window pane shadow must be part of the briefing room set, because it showed up again), so they all go down to the mining planet.

Now, two of the Three Hotties are apparently soulless vamps who love being hooked on Venus Drugs and bamboozling men, but Eve, the blonde hottie in the pink sparkly v-neck (in the future, all hot women will have only one dress which they wear all the time) has a conscience, and she doesn't like taking those nasty drugs and trying to deceive nice guys like Captain Kirk with her artificially enhanced wiles. Eve is overcome by despair down on the mining planet and charges out the door in a "magnetic storm." Kirk and miner guy Childress run out to save her; after being viciously beaten about the face and hair by confetti, Kirk decides that he and Spock should go back to the Enterprise and search for Eve and Childress via infrared sensor (duh). Meanwhile Childress finds Eve and takes her to a remote cabin where, despite the fact that she is cooking, cleaning, playing cards, and generally trying to be an awesome boon companion to him, he is an asshole to her. (She has reverted to 'ugly,' by the way, although of course it's hard to tell.) The Enterprise pinpoints this cabin. Kirk and Mudd arrive. Kirk explains about the Venus drugs. Childress is upset. Eve gets pissed off and tells Childress he doesn't want a wife, he just "wants these," "these" being a handful of Venus drugs she's grabbed out of Mudd's pillbox. She takes the "drugs," then turns around all "beautiful" again and asks Childress if he wants a "useful" wife or this "selfish" vain sexpot created by the Venus drugs. Kirk then pipes up to say that in fact, Childress can have both because those Venus drugs Eve just took were just colored gelatin, there's only "one kind of woman," and as long as Eve can "believe in herself," she can become just as hot as she is on the Venus drugs. Childress naturally LOVES that deal, and Eve decides to stay with him because Kirk's not available since he's married to the Enterprise, and Childress agrees to give Kirk those dilithium crystals after all, and Kirk and Mudd go back to the Enterprise, and Mudd will presumably be handed over to the authorities while McCoy and Spock reprise their banter even more leadenly and the Enterprise heads out into space, leaving the 3 women down there "married" to the three troglodyte dilithium "miners." **END SUMMARY**

What?

All right, first let's talk about the "Venus drugs." Overall, the episode's treatment of them makes no sense. On board the ship, it is established pretty clearly that the Venus drugs do have a fairly powerful biological effect, not just on the women who take them but on the men around them. The brunette in the Hottie Trio--I believe her name might be Marga--puts the moves on McCoy in sickbay and while doing so accidentally brushes up against his medical scanner, which behaves very strangely. Now McCoy never actually explains what it is that is strange about these readings. But clearly, the point of this scene is to indicate that the Venus drugs alter her life signs. It's also established during the "hearing" that these Venus drugs make the men around them go into some kind of state of heightened arousal. Mudd's explanation fo them is that Venus drugs give you "more of whatever you've got," meaning that they make men more "muscular" and women "rounder." (In the future, estrogen and testosterone will be lumped together into one awesome prescription which is so smart it knows whether you're a man or a woman and so wedded to binary gender divisions that it wouldn't even think of making you trans.)

And yet, when McCoy is musing on whether these women are "more beautiful, pound for pound, measurement by measurement" (yes, folks, verbatim quote) than any others, he does suggest that it's just because they "act beautiful," which I suppose is meant to prepare us for the fact that, surprise, Eve doesn't NEED the Venus Drugs to be beautiful, all she has to do is BELIEVE that she is beautiful! You see? TRUE beauty comes from WITHIN!

Horseshit.

Seriously. "True beauty," as created by the production team in this episode, consists of moisturizer, makeup, and hairstyling. Oh, and the bangin' hot bods these actresses all need in order to fill out William Theiss's costumes (when they materialize, they are artfully arranged so all the flavors are represented: we get a good view of Marga's ass, Eve's boobs, and Ruth's legs). And whatever they do to make the screen go all misty misty whenever they're in closeup. And the smoldering come-hither looks, too, I forgot that. Yes, ladies, we need all this to be beautiful. Because let's remember that until Eve psyches herself into returning to her Venus-drug appearance, she's "plain as a bucket."

I mean I could list all the crimes against, you know, parity. For instance, lonely men stuck on isolated planets can afford to be choosy about how beautiful their mail-order (sorry, subspace radio-order) brides are, but lonely women stuck on manless isolated planets have to be grateful for whatever lump of troglodyte they can scare up. Eve's reward for teaching herself how to be "beautiful" without the drugs is a lifetime living with Childress, who let's remember has been an asshole to her apart from going out in the storm  
to save her life, and doing his cooking and cleaning.

Oh, and Eve's whole thing about how much better it is to have a "useful" wife than a pretty one. What awesome radical feminism that is...or rather was, back when Mary Wollstonecraft made that argument in 1797. And what is it with the useful/pretty dichotomy anyway? Do beautiful women HAVE to be vain and selfish? I mean I guess as long as "beauty" is defined as "slathered with makeup and wearing the world's most impractical gossamer confection while taking great care never to break a nail or disarrange a hair," then the answer would have to be yes, wouldn't it?

Anyway, this all confirms what the casting and treatment of Yeoman Rand always suggested to me: these guys wouldn't know "beautiful" if it hit them with a plank. Speaking of Yeoman Rand, she does not get stalked, harassed, or assaulted in this episode...because she does not appear in it. Also speaking of Rand, Kirk comes back to HIS quarters in this episode to find a stalker waiting for him (this would be Eve, who tries to make a play for him but can't because she's too honest). Strangely, this does not result in an attempted rape, though there is some facial fondling.

All right, good things about this episode, let's see...uh...Kirk's shirt does not get torn, pushing the Kirk's Denuded Torso Frequency back down to 1 in 2. Also, I like what the director did with Spock, who spends the whole episode sort of looking on archly and with world-weary disdain at the idiotic antics of these human males with their pitiful hormone-addled brains. It's almost campy. By the way, Sulu is the one male crew member who is never shown drooling over the women, and in fact spends some time trying to snap his fellow helmsman out of it. Hmm. Also this is the first time we hear a computer talk. Oh, and nobody gets almost raped in this episode, except that since three women do get more or less sold into prostitution (oh, and by the way, Kirk, if you really want to know whether the three women you've picked up are traveling with that space pirate pimp "voluntarily," here's a tip: don't ask them that question WHILE HE IS IN THE ROOM WITH THEM) it's a little hard to celebrate that.

But mainly, I just came away from it thinking, "Really?" As in, this is what was in your fantasy world, Gene? Superhot spacebabes? Really? You built a whole episode around the apparently deeply mysterious fact that women sure do look different without makeup on? Really? You get the chance to make up any story you want in your very own universe and what you want is space pirate pimps meets Seven Brides for Seven Brothers? Really? You ever watched a woman age? No? Really?

  
All right, next up...let's see, what's next up. Oh my God...it's "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"

She can't take much more o' THIS!


	7. WHAT ARE LITTLE GIRLS MADE OF?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we have our second double-Kirk episode, and we have our first face-off between Kirk and an artificial intelligence. Also, the most character development Nurse Chapel will ever really have.

**STARDATE: June 15, 2011**

**EPISODE: What Are Little Girls Made Of?**  
 **Written by: Robert Bloch**  
  
You know, I was pleasantly surprised by this episode. The title is the worst part. Well, let me think about that for a minute. What I mean is, the title refers to an aspect of the episode which is pretty pukeworthy but not all that important. A more accurate title would have been, "What Are Starship Captains Made Of?" or "Creating A Race of Superpowerful Humanlike Machines: Must It Always End in Tragedy?" or maybe "Would You Believe Kirk Got Himself Duplicated AGAIN?"  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise approaches another ice planet. This one is special, though, because Nurse Chapel's fiance Roger Corby (a brilliant medical anthropologist whose work was required reading at Starfleet Academy and who is a personal hero of Kirk's) disappeared on this planet five years earlier. Since then he has not been heard of and two expeditions have failed to find him, but what the hell, Uhura's opened the hailing frequencies anyway. At long last they hear from Corby. He discovered an underground network of shelters created by the planet's now-dead inhabitants after their sun went pffft and has been living in them for the past 5 years. He is pleasantly surprised to hear that Nurse Chapel is on board. All seems well, except that he wants Kirk and Nurse Chapel to beam down alone. After Corby doesn't show up at the rendezvous, Kirk takes the precaution of beaming down a couple redshirts. While the red shirts are bumped off by a mysterious gigantic bald big-headed hatchet-faced being wearing an overstuffed suit, Kirk and Nurse Chapel are taken to Corby's lair and discover that the Old Ones (the previous inhabitants) were big into creating androids. Corby's crew includes an android replica of his former assistant Brown (dispatched early; these androids don't stand up well to phasering), the aforementioned gigantic hatchet-faced gentleman (whose name is Ruk and who can toss Kirk around like he was a Nerf ball), and Andrea, a lithe young thing with long dark hair wearing a kind of a Cross Your Abs Bra instead of a top. Nurse Chapel is dismayed to learn about Andrea, but she and Kirk soon have bigger problems. Corby wants to keep Kirk incommunicado until he can convince Kirk to let him bring his android setup to a different colony with more resources--and, of course, not tell anyone about his scheme to replace the flawed human body with the "practical immortality" offered by the androd body (immortal till you take your first phaser hit, but anyway). Kirk doesn't want to be kept incommunicado. The situation escalates. Corby finally decides to strap a stark naked Kirk onto the Rotating Android Duplication Disk opposite a vaguely human-shaped blob of resin and spin the whole assembly REALLY FAST until, by dint of turning knobs and fiddling with dials, they have turned the blob of resin into a perfect android duplicate of Kirk.   
  
While this operation is taking place, Kirk deliberately embeds in the android's mind the words, "Mind your own business, Mr. Spock. None of your half-breed interference, do you hear?" The android duplicate heads up to the Enterprise to do Corby's bidding. His first interaction with Spock elicits the "half-breed' crack. Spock starts surreptitiously organizing a landing party. Meanwhile, Kirk puts the moves on Andrea. His steamy embrace (during which he grabs her so hard you can see the prints of his fingers on her shoulders after he lets go) awakens feelings which greatly confuse Andrea. This has unfortunate results for the android Kirk, who responds to Andrea's "I will kiss you now" with "It is illogical," whereupon she vaporizes him. Kirk also tries goading Ruk into rebellion against Corby. Ruk reveals that he and his android buddies wiped out the Old Ones because the Old Ones were trying to shut them off, and has a sudden epiphany: "THAT was the equation! Existence! Survival cancels out programming!" The suddenly slow-moving Ruk tries to take out Corby, who zots him with a phaser, causing him to disappear. During a struggle with Kirk, Corby gets his hand caught in an automatic door; some of the skin scrapes away, and sure enough, there are circuits underneath. They ahve all this time been dealing with android Corby--the machine into which Corby tranferred his consciousness after his own body started to deterioriate. Kirk and Nurse Chapel convince android Corby that he's not the same as real Corby and that real Corby wouldn't have done any of the nasty things he's been doing. When Andrea shows up and tries to psych herself back into being "in love" with Corby, Corby allows her to put him in a clinch and then incinerates both of them. Spock shows up just in time with the landing party, asking, "Where's Dr. Corby?" to which Kirk responds dramatically, "Dr. Corby was never here." Back on the bridge, Spock calls Kirk on his use of the "unscientific" term "half-breed." Kirk promises to choose another term "the next time I find myself in a similar situation." **END SUMMARY**

[](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[ **lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/), who's started watching these episodes since she's been sick, said about halfway through this one, "Are we supposed to be surprised when it turns out that Corby's an android?" Yes...yes we are. In Bloch's defense, there's a limited number of things you can do with an android plot, and most of them involve the uncanniness of not being able to tell whether something is an android or a Real Live Person. I used to think that android stories were all about the fear of humans being replaced or destroyed by their own technology. Now, I think they may be more about the classic philosophical problem of perception vs. reality. We can't actually _be_ inside the heads or consciousnesses of the people we're close to. We believe that we have some idea of what's going on inside them. But there's no way for us to _know_. The person you're married to could be completely different inside from what you imagine. So the Big Anxiety these android stories hook into is the question: Does the Other truly exist? Or is s/he merely the projection of my own consciousness?  
  
When a 1960s era human male formulates it, that question apparently takes this form: If I fell in love with something that looked, felt, and acted exactly like a really hot woman who was really into me, but I knew it was just a machine, would it bother me that she wasn't "real"? Or would it be, maybe, awesome?  
  
That's clearly what's being explored in Andrea's part of the plot. Nurse Chapel, upon being informed that Andrea is an android, refers to her as a "mechanical geisha?" Corby does not at any point deny that Andrea is a mechanical geisha. The way he tries to make Chapel all right with it is by insisting that Andrea doesn't have real feelings. (See? I've been bonking her for the past 5 years, but it's all right, because I treat her like an inanimate object and she responds soullessly to my commands! Honey? Christine, where ya goin'?) The pukeworthiest part of all this is not so much the mechanical geisha thing as the fact that Kirk is able to give Andrea feelings just by kissing her REALLY HARD. ("Yes! That was the equation! Prince's kiss cancels out programming!") That Kirk's gotta be some pretty hot stuff if his mere tongue can endow a machine with human consciousness.  
  
So, male androids develop consciousness when their survival is threatened; female ones develop it when Kirk awakens their nonexistent sexual desires. Whatever. My point is that Andrea's plot is more minor than the title implies, and could be eliminated from the episode without doing it any harm. The real meat of htis plot is Kirk's replication. During the android creation scene BOTH Kirks are totally naked, so this just throws the whole Kirk's Denuded Torso percentage totally out of wack. Chapel watches the whole process, so she gets to see her Heroic Male Leader in an unbelievably vulnerable, not to mention awkward, situation; one wonders how this affected their future working relationship. Looking at the blob of resin on the android duplicating disk, I thought, jeez, that could just as well be a golem. And really, as imagined here, it really doesn't matter much that these androids are machines. They could just as easily be windup dolls. What matters is the uncanniness of duplication, of a human outside that might or might not have an inside.   
  
There's a fairly entertaining scene in which real Kirk and android Kirk bounce insults off each other, and a number of exciting moments in which Kirk attempts to escape only to be humiliated yet again by Ruk. (In the most amusing, Kirk escapes into the caverns and tries to club Ruk with an enormous pink phallus, excuse me, "stalactite." It doesn't go well.) For some reason, by the way, Ruk wears pink and gray, while everyone else wears these asymmetrical olive-and-navy ensembles (in the future, the machines will manufacture only two colors of cloth and no single swatch will be large enough to make a whole outfit). With Kirk, however, everything is clear cut: android Kirk is clearly not fundamentally the same as real Kirk and the problem he presents is purely practical. The Big Questions get attached to Corby, who has actually had his consciousness transferred to the android brain. Corby destroys himself because he has come to believe that he is no longer human...but this act of self-destruction is framed as the proof that he does in fact have something human left in him. Kirk's announcement that Corby "was never here" is thus left open for debate.  
  
Nurse Chapel has a much better wig, but is not given a whole lot to do apart from be more and more disillusioned with her darling Roger. Majel Barrett does a decent job; my favorite moment is her response to android Kirk (who she thinks is real Kirk) commisserating about how hard it must be to be torn between her captain and her fiance: "No, I'm not torn." She does not have to get into an outright catfight with Andrea, though there is an interesting moment when Andrea says, "I am programmed to please you also now," and you think, hmmm. That could be interesting. I'd also like to know what Nurse Chapel is really thinking while she's staring at the two naked Kirks trying to tell them apart. (Threesome?) She does get to save Kirk's life because Kirk has earlier cajoled Corby into telling Ruk that he can never disobey an order from Chapel. (This bit involves an allusion to Hitchcock's _North by Northwest_ which can't have been unintentional.) Toward the end, when Corby is desperately searching for a way to prove to them that he's still human, he bellows, "Christine! Let me prove it to you!" Seeing as the ability to arouse and be aroused has already been demonstrated to be quintessentially human, God alone knows what this "proof" would have involved; but fortunately she declines.   
  
Next up..."Miri." Oy.


	8. MIRI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Historically important as the first "whoa, another planet that inexplicably is exactly like Earth" episode. Otherwise, fairly lackluster with a few interesting moments.

**STARDATE: June 16, 2011**

  
**EPISODE: MIRI**  
 **Written by: Adrian Spies**

Android stories I can view with Brechtian detachment. Epidemic stories freak me out. Even when they are as cheesily put together as this one. Disease scares me. The whole feral-child thing is something I take a different view of now that I've spent four years trying to civilize the one I have. But most of all, looking back on this as an adult, there's just a lot of extra creepiness about the way this Spies handles the obligatory Kirk "love interest." Seeing as she is a barely pubescent girl.

**The Summary:** The Enterprise encounters an "Earth style" distress signal from an unknown planet. As they get closer to the planet, they are startled to discover that it appears to be an exact duplicate of Earth. (Exact as in you can see the Great Lakes from the bridge.) When Kirk Spock, McCoy, Rand, and two redshirts beam down, they are further startled to discover that it looks like main street in a small American city circa 1960... assuming it had been abandoned for 300 years. All of this is forgotten, however, when a crazed creature jumps Dr. McCoy from behind. Kirk beats the crap out of this crazed creature, who on closer inspection turns out to be covered with some kind of very bad skin disease and who is more concerned about the fact that his tricycle is broken than his swiftly approaching death. The creature dies (maybe, as [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/)  said, Kirk hit him too hard, though he does have a "seizure of some kind"). When they search an abandoned house they discover a girl hiding in a closet who begs them not to hurt her. Her name is Miri, and from what she says they gather that all the adults on this planet went crazy and died years ago, and the children are out there fending for themselves. She discovers a bright blue lesion on Kirk's hand, and explains that he has caught the disease that killed all the grownups and which occasionally kills some of the older surviving children. Pretty soon they've all got it except Spock (plus or minus the redshirts). She takes them to the abandoned hospital, where McCoy beams down some equipment and tries to find the infectious agent. Now, the science of this plague is very dodgy, but as far as I can figure out, the inhabitants were experimenting with "life prolongation" and created a chain reaction of different viruses whose operations would magically extend the life of the human cell. Which worked great, except that one of these viruses turns out to be deadly to anyone who's hit puberty. _Before_ you hit puberty, if you have all these viruses, you age only one month for every hundred years. So all these kids are survivors of the original plague, who have only aged 3 months in the 300 years since it hit. The virus kills older people faster, which is a bummer for Dr. McCoy. It's also a bummer for Miri, who is just on the verge of puberty. How do they know she's "becoming a young woman?" Because she has a crush on Kirk, that's how.

While they race against time, Jahn, the obnoxious leader of the local community of feral children, devises a plan to steal the landing party's communicators, which cuts them off from the ship. Everyone starts to get a little testy as the disease advances. A tearful Yeoman Rand takes Kirk aside to show him her lesions; Miri gets jealous, and runs off to betray them to the gang of feral children. She suggests they kidnap Rand. Kirk is able to re-enlist Miri's help by telling her that she and all the other children will inevitably die unless McCoy finds a cure. She agrees to take him to the feral children's hideout, where we are treated to the spectacle of Kirk trying to control a classroom full of children. For some reason he thinks the best way to do it is to rip his sleeves open to show them his lesions; I really am not sure how to score that on the Kirk's Denuded Torsometer, which has been out of wack since the Double Naked Kirks Exposure in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" Anyway, Kirk manages to get them to free Rand, restore the communicators, and come back with him to the hospital, where he discovers that McCoy got impatient and decided to test the vaccine on himself. McCoy's unconscious; but the lesions are disappearing, and one assumes he will make it. Before you can say "Dr. Kildare," everyone's back on the bridge. They left a medical team behind to cure the kids (one medical team for the whole planet?), 'Space Central,' whatever that is, is sending out a team of adult advisors, and all that's left for our heroes to do is wind the episode up in classic Star Trek Season One fashion with a joke deflecting the creepy gender stuff. Take it away, Yeoman:

**RAND: She really did love you, you know.**  
 **KIRK: (smiling wistfully) I never get involved with older women, Yeoman.**

**END SUMMARY**.

Well, here it is: The first inexplicably exact replication of Earth, by which I basically mean American, culture on an alien planet. These episodes always kind of pissed me off because it's just so nakedly a cop-out. There's no amount of quantum whatsamajiggering that can camouflage the fact that the writers and producers just felt like doing an episode where they didn't have to create a new alien culture from scratch. Instead, you just call up all the old _Twilight Zone_ set people and say, "Hey, we need a postapocalyptic American wasteland, can you do it by Friday?" and they say, "Sure thing. You want nuclear apocalypse, environmental catastrophe, or fatal pandemic?"

Spies apparently wrote for _Dr. Kildare_ before doing this episode, which might explain the choice: the premise basically allows him to write what he knows, although as far as biology goes he doesn't seem to know much. It must be extremely frustrating to be a doctor and watch this show. I mean, I'm not a doctor; but even I know that a vaccine is something you give people to STOP them from getting the disease. It's no bloody use to someone who's already got it. What they're looking for is a cure, an antidote, whatever. It's not totally clear that in this episode McCoy even knows the difference between a virus and a bacterium. But I will say that the epidemic part of the plot was the most effective for me. For my money, the best moment in the episode is the little scene in which Kirk tries to tell Miri that she and all her friends are doomed to get the disease. On the one hand, it's highly unrealistic that a 13 year old girl hasn't deduced this from experience over the past 300 years. (As [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/)  said, "A four year old could figure this out.") But on the other hand, her pathetic insistence that the older kids only get the disease "sometimes" mirrors our own attitude about mortality; we know other people die, but for a long time, we go on believing that it won't happen to us.

The whole attitude about mortality in this episode is interestingly inconsistent. Everyone keeps talking about how these experiments in life prologation "didn't work." They did work; all these kids do have extremely long lives. They just never become adults. The episode presents Kirk et al. as saving their lives by curing the disease; but if you look at it purely from a temporal standpoint, what Kirk is really doing is bringing death into the world and all their woe. There will be many more opportunities to comment on the "we walked out of Eden" plot, cause it will show up frequently, so I will move on to the episode's treatment of children.

The feral children in this episode are sort of a cross between _Peter Pan_ and _Lord of the Flies._ On the one hand they do nothing all day but play games ("fooleys" or "follys," as they call them) and they are surrounded by masks, costumes, broken toys, and so on; the way they tie Rand up after capturing her has "let's play pirates" written all over it. On the other hand, they're violent little beasts who attack and beat up Kirk during his big classroom speech. On yet a third hand, their innocence is opposed to the corrupted carnality of the "grups" (the kids have their own slang) who, under the influence of the plague, went insane and started "hurting people." On the fourth hand, especially in the characterization of Jahn and his henchman, they represent the rebellious youth culture of the 1960s. Doing a lot of work here, these children; they're also 300 years old, except there's absolutely nothing about them that convinces you of that. They all talk and act as if the grown-ups were wiped out only yesterday and they're still living in a state of emergency. In fact, [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/)  and I agreed, after 300 years these kids would have created their own civilization. It would be a crazy civilization, but it would probably be a lot more interesting and even more functional than what's represented in the episode. Children are a lot smarter than this episode gives them credit for being. Especially kids in the 10-12 range--and there are plenty--would be perfectly capable of building stuff, hunting, and probably eventually organizing farming given 300 years of trial and error and the existence of all the books and technology left behind by the "grups." Their literature would probably be a tad immature but I bet there'd be some beautiful art. In fact, I think a novel about the civilization these kids would eventually have developed would be kind of awesome. Maybe someday I will write one.

But that of course reveals what was probably the best thing _Star Trek_ did for me: the realization of any given premise is so schematic that you have to do a lot of your own work filling it in. _Star Wars_ is the same way. That's really what all this stuff did for me: it got my own imagination working to compensate for all the stuff that _wasn't_ there.

Spies only wrote one TOS episode, and I can see why; the plotting is more than usually sloppy. For instance, once the hunt for the "vaccine" is on Spies seems to completely forget about the two redshirts. They're never around; nobody ever mentions them. When the children steal Kirk, Spock, and McCoy's communicators, nobody thinks to ask whether the security guys still have theirs. The way the kids do this, by the way, is by creating a diversion and then sending Jahn in through the window to grab them. The only reason this works is that McCoy, Spock, and Kirk momentarily become so dumb that _all three of them_ run out of the lab, leaving their communicators on the counters like so many forgotten cell phones. (It occurred to me watching this that _Star Trek_ nostalgia may explain my irrational attachment to the clamshell cell phone design.)

And then there's Miri.

[](http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=lizetal)lizaetal noticed that when Miri is initially discovered, she sounds and acts exactly like Judy Garland. That makes some sense now that IMDB has informed me that Kim Darby, the "child" actress, was actually around 19 when this episode was made; like Garland in _The Wizard of Oz,_ she was a teenaged girl playing a child. From her costuming and her putative age, she is supposed to be around about 12-13. (Darby does a great job, by the way. She later got to play the kid in _True Grit_ opposite John Wayne.) I buy her having a crush on Kirk. What's creepy is the way Kirk, with the support of the rest of the landing party, encourages it. When he tells her in their first encounter that she's "very pretty," you don't know whether he's deliberately cultivating an ally or whether he's really attracted to her. In addition to having the hots for Kirk and developing the plague, another symptom of "becoming a young woman" is doing housework to please your man; Kirk gets Miri wiping down the tables and sharpening pencils while they all work on the antidote. Kirk never kisses her, but his scenes with Miri use a lot of the same choreography we see in his scenes with Yeoman Rand: holding on to her while she weeps and he looks over her head, grabbing her shoulders and talking to her impassionedly, and so on. This is why they need that joke; the fact that Kirk has this potentially mutual attraction going on with Miri can (sort of) be made OK by the fact that she's 300. Except not really. And the look on his face after Rand says "she really loved you..." You can't tell whether he kind of wishes he could go back and follow that up, or whether he's just very pleased that even 13 year olds think he's hot.

Speaking of Rand...it says something about the show so far that as soon as I saw her in the landing party I felt a sense of dread. Why do they need her? I thought. Is she going to get raped? Well, no; I will give Spies credit for writing the only Rand episode so far in which she is not harassed/assaulted/stalked, though she is kidnapped. But where there is Rand, there is pukeworthiness; and in this case, in addition to using her to set up the feminine jealousy plot, Spies has her coming unglued not over her impending death but over the disfigurement caused by the blotches. During her chat with Kirk in the corridor, she bares her shoulder to show him a nasty one, then sobs out, "On the ship, I used to try to get you to look at my legs. Look at my legs!" He looks; she's got a nasty lesion right up at the top of one thigh. She covers it with her hand so you can't be sure but it looked to me like the makeup people put that thing on _over_ her Starfleet regulation sheer black stockings. Whitney does a good job making that effective; but it's just so uncomfortable and awkward and sad and creepy and another reason why my psyche wanted to stay the hell away from that character. So, she was _trying_ to get him to look at her legs all that time? Oh, well, then I guess it makes perfect sense that Evil Kirk tried to rape her, huh? Faugh.

Ah well. Up next: Dagger of the Mind.


	9. DAGGER OF THE MIND

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A good, freaky early episode featuring a lot of Shatner's _je ne sais WTF?_

**STARDATE: June 20, 2011**

  
**DAGGER OF THE MIND**  
 **Written by: S. Bar-David (IMDB says his real name was Shimon Whinchelberg)**

The other day someone asked me if I was enjoying watching the show, since I seem to be so critical of it. I should start out, therefore, by saying that I am enjoying it hugely. As I said, "If I didn't love it, I wouldn't care how bad it was."

Fans whose Star Trek life began with _Next Generation_ or some later incarnation cannot, perhaps, appreciate what it's like to love TOS. I know there are people out there who consumed TOS uncritically and thought every inch of it was awesome. But most of the TOS fans I know love the show understanding that it contains many badnesses of various kinds. For a start, there's the production values. (I enjoy playing "spot the common household object." My favorite so far is the spray bottles they have lined up on the counter in sickbay filled with some mysterious futuristic red fluid.) I think the cheesiness of the production is what made it so lovable, by making it so accessible. This is one of the things that irritates me about the "restoration." If you can't see the wire holding up NOMAD, it just ain't Trek!

The failures of vision are worse, too, because Star Trek is supposed to be a utopian future in which Earth has gotten its shit together and solved all of its major problems. Which is one of the most attractive things about the Star Trek universe, frankly, because most of the time the future looks pretty dark and it's nice to get to escape to a place where things have actually gotten better. So it's a pain to be reminded that these guys just didn't _see_ most of the problems involving, you know, women. And then there's the fact that in the future, there are no gay people.

But then, I think part of the reason I fell for Star Trek as a teenager is that it was just like I was then: idealistic and progressive (in theory) but with a very limited understanding of gender/sexual politics, a vastly oversimplified understanding of race and racism, high tolerance for American (sorry, "human") exceptionalism, and 100% blindness to its own shortcomings. But still fabulous!

I find in looking over these last 9 episodes that for a starship whose mission was supposedly to go "where no man has gone before," the Enterprise spends a surprising amount of time dealing with shit that, in fact, has not been resolved on Earth or amongst its far-flung colonies. There are only three episodes so far that involve "going where no man has gone before": "Where No Man Has Gone Before," "The Enemy Within" (nearly all of which takes place on board the ship) and "Miri" (which sort of doesn't count because the planet is an exact replica of Earth).

Anyway, all this is by way of saying that the most effective episodes so far have been the ones that acknowledge the ways in which human beings and human society are deeply and perhaps irrevocably fouled up. These are "The Naked Time," "The Enemy Within," and now #9, "Dagger of the Mind," which is a great example of what _Star Trek_ does when it works.

**The Summary:** The Enterprise is passing by the Tantalus Penal Colony and transporting some supplies to them. It is established that the TPC is protected by a forcefield which prevents people from apparating on the grounds. (Whoops, did I say "apparate?" Sorry, I meant "transport.") Anyway, the TPC is an institution for the criminally insane presided over by the legendary Dr. Adams, whose progressive ideas have revolutionized the treatment of the mentally ill and criminally inclined. The Enterprise beams up one large crate which turns out to be full of escaped inmate. The fugitive (played by Morgan Woodward, who must have graduated with honors from the Peter Lorre School of Bulgy-Eyeballed Wild Stares) turns out to be Dr. Simon Van Gelder, Adams's assistant. Van Gelder is clearly traumatized by whatever happened to him down there, but is acting batshit crazy, so there's some difference of opinion about what to do. McCoy more or less forces Kirk to go down to the TPC and investigate. Kirk asks McCoy to find him someone with experience in psychology and penology (heh heh) to go with him, since--OF COURSE--Dr. Adams wants him to come down with a "minimal staff." (Dude, did you learn NOTHING from "What Little Girls Are Made Of?") McCoy sends him Dr. Helen Noel, with whom Kirk apparently had some kind of fling at the science lab Christmas party (in the future, everyone on Earth will celebrate Christmas) which he now looks back on with chagrin.

Anyway, down they go to the Tantalus Penal Colony. They are greeted by a jolly Dr. Adams and introduced to his assistant Lethe, who responds to Kirk's question about what her crime was with, "That person no longer exists." (Yes...her name really is Lethe. I checked. You know, the Greek river of forgetfulness. And Tantalus is that poor bastard with the water always juuuuuust out of reach. And the title comes from _Macbeth_. S. Bar-David apparently has a weakness for the classics.) Dr. Noel (oh, I get it...it was at the CHRISTMAS PARTY! and her name is NOEL! That S. Bar-David, I tell ya, wheels within wheels) blithely observes that "memory shifting is a basic part of therapy."

Kirk happens upon a treatment room containing the "neural neutralizer," a sinister-looking overhead light fixture that gives off a REALLY ANNOYING noise. Dr. Adams says the neural neutralizer was an experiment that failed; nevertheless, as can be plainly seen from the poor bastard with the blank stare who's sitting in the big neural-neutralizing-La-Z-Boy, they are still using it. Well, up on the Enterprise, McCoy and Spock have heard from Van Gelder about this "neural neutralizer" and they're pretty sure it's bad news. While Spock mindmelds with Van Gelder to find out more, Brad and Janet, excuse me, Kirk and Noel decide to stay the night at Tantalus because hey, they're on their own in a penal colony protected by a forcefield that prevents communication or beaming down/up and it's run by a guy who may be corrupt and who's probably gutted the brain of the last guy who was on to him (Van Gelder, by the way, responds to the news that Kirk and Noel are staying over by thrashing and screaming "NOOOOOOOOO!!!), so what's the worst that could happen?

Well, in the middle of the night Kirk heads down to Dr. "call me Helen" Noel's room and they go exploring. They find the neural neutralizer room--unattended and unlocked, of course--and decide that the smart thing to do is for Kirk to sit in the treatment room and for Dr. Noel to play around with the neural neutralizer and see what happens. So, they discover that a) Kirk has no memory of the 'treatments' after they're over b) it's super-easy for Dr. Noel to plant suggestions in Kirk's mind without him even realizing she's done it and c) HOLY SHIT, DR. ADAMS AND HIS GOONS HAVE SEIZED THE CONTROLS! And they're making Kirk think he's crazy in love with Helen! And they're making him drop his phaser! And they're making him drop his communicator only he keeps trying to call the Enterprise even though he's in excruciating pain and howling and laughing like a crazy guy and what, you're gonna cut to commercial NOW?!?!?!?!?!11!!

Sorry. I resume.

Kirk wakes up in his guest quarters being tended to by Helen. He starts telling her about how he's always loved her, and she tells him Adams planted that in his mind, and all of a sudden he has total recall. So he sends her through the AC ducts to try to shut the main power off to cut the forcefield. He, meanwhile, gets hauled off for another treatment, which is going very badly for Kirk when Dr. Noel pulls the big lever and the power goes out. Kirk beats down Dr. Adams and leaves him unconscious on the floor of the treatment room while he runs off to find Helen. Spock, meanwhile, has learned enough about the neural neutralizer from Van Gelder's brain to be down in engineering trying to blast through the forcefield; he seizes the opportunity to beam in. Spock shuts down the forcefield, restores the main power, and sets off in search of Kirk, who he finds locked in a steamy suggestion-induced clinch with Helen. Kirk suddenly remembers that Dr. Adams is lying unconscious on the floor of the treatment room, where the neural neutralizer is now on full blast. When they get there, he's dead. Died of loneliness, apparently, since there was nobody there to talk to him. And then they're all back on the bridge and Kirk's a bit moody but then he's all "Ahead warp factor one," and they're all, yay, he's back, and off they go without so much as entering a commendation into the record for Dr. Helen Noel who saved his gold braided ass and who was also badass enough to propel one of the goons to a sizzling electric death one kick of her go-go boot. **END SUMMARY**  


 

 

  
[](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) and I (I have now corrupted her) agreed this episode was 100X more effective than the others, largely because it's better constructed. In most of the others there is really only one through-line; there's some shifting back and forth to follow different characters but they're all doing more or less the same thing. "Dagger of the Mind" is much more suspenseful because there are two parallel investigations--Spock and McCoy's investigation into Van Gelder and Kirk and Noel's investigation on the planet- but communication between the two is sporadic. S. Bar-David, as irritating as he is with the Meaningful Naming Disease, is very skilful at switching between the two lines to heighten the suspense. As one investigation gets just a bit father, we see the other investigators about to blunder into a trap about which we know just enough to be freaked out but no more. So the episode does a good job of making you really care how the characters are going to get out of the predicaments they get into.

The other reason it's more effective, of course, is the premise. Early on Kirk is enthusing about how awesome rehab is now that Dr. Adams has revolutionized penology (heh heh) and McCoy says, "A cage is still a cage." True then, true now: any time you put a bunch of people who are vulnerable, marginalized, or marked as anti-social into a remote institution where there is very little external oversight, it is basically a matter of time before the abuse begins. Though nobody has yet invented a device as effective and terrifying as the neural neutralizer, we're all aware that we're all being brainwashed all the time in more insidious ways. And the experience of being trapped and tormented and having nowhere to run is something common to many of us--at least those of us who were bullied, either by our peers or by our parents. And we are terrified by the idea of losing our individuality, though we may not all be quite as terrified of "emptying" our minds as Van Gelder seems to be. So while "Dagger of the Mind" exaggerates all of these fears into Star Trek's particular brand of allegorical cheesiness, that doesn't take the scare out. Just makes it bigger.

Even the fact that the lead characters behave like idiots works to the episode's advantage; the fact that you can see things coming and they can't heightens your concern. I am perhaps being a bit harsh because it's not that Kirk doesn't know that this neural neutralizer thing is dangerous. Nevertheless. The two of them wander in there, and all right, I can see how deciding to test it might make some sense if you liked to live on the edge. Dr. Noel does claim that she understands similar therapies that have been tried elsewhere and that she'll be able to tell if the NN is frying Kirk's brain; and that does explain why they have to test it on him and not her. Still. They establish that the subject doesn't remember the treatment. They establish that the operator can brainwash the subject. Then Dr. Noel says, "I think we should try it again" and Kirk says, "Yes, let's use something unusual." Guys...now is NOT the time to incorporate brainwashing into your erotic play!

Because essentially that's what happens, and you kind of have to wonder if Kirk knows that's what's gonna happen and is into it. She turns on the NN, and then reminds him of their Christmas party encounter, and then suggests that "it happened in a different way," and then we're in fantasyland which is fuzzy at the edges and she's basically writing him a fic in which he "sweeps her off her feet," carries her back to her quarters, and then has a strange little conversation with her in which she asks him if he "cares for" her and he says, "Do you want me to manufacture a lie? Wrap it up for you like a Christmas present?" She says, "No, I prefer honesty." And then they go at it. Now I find it interesting that this is supposed to be _her_ fantasy. And in her fantasy, apparently, she doesn't want true love; she wants NSA sex with her hot captain and although she wants it to be all impetuous and spontaneous she wants it clarified ahead of time that nothing will come of it and they will probably never speak again.(I might add that before Helen gets wrestled away from the controls, Kirk has a huge grin on his face; and why wouldn't he, since this is the first actually consensual sexual encounter we've seen him have.) One might think of this as a progressive touch--certainly it  
marks her as a hard-headed independent pro-sexual revolution gal--if only it weren't for that damn miniskirt.

Sure, a 21st century woman can go out and rock a miniskirt and be as badass as she wants to be. Sure, I am as avid an admirer of the female form as Gene ever was. But when it's part of the _uniform,_ and when the sheer black stockings are also part of the uniform, and when this woman is supposed to be wearing this to her work as a psychologist every day...I'm just sayin' that after 3 weeks of watching this show I would give my eyeteeth to see another woman on TOS wearing a pair of frickin' pants.

So, Dr. Noel carefully does _not_ implant in Kirk the suggestion that he's really in love with her. That comes from the evil Dr. Adams, and it's clearly an attempt to a) show how much he can fuck with Kirk's mind (cause the REAL Kirk would NEVER be crazy enough to fall for a girl like that!) b) create huge problems for him later on and c) perhaps goad him to rape Dr. Noel. There is one very weird moment when it looks like that's what's going to happen--they shoot Shatner like they used to shoot Evil Kirk and show her backing away from him--but instead he gets over it and heads to the vents. (In the future, they will cover AC ducts with screens that look exactly like the screens we used to have on our radiatiors when I was a kid.) I am going to start keeping track to see whether, on this show, true love is something produced in the male characters always and only by mind control. Since we don't see Helen again after the rescue, we don't know whether the suggestion wore off or what. Maybe they will just get drunk and get laid again at the science lab Ramadan party.

Kirk sends a message to Dr. McCoy, after he discovers that Noel will be his copilot, that "she better check out as the best damn assistant I have ever had. " Well, Dr. Noel gets decent marks on the Plucky Sidekick scorecard (she is game for messing with megavoltage even though she knows nothing about it; she crawls through the vents with a hearty, "Anything's better than Dr. Adams's treatment room;" though she follows the 1960s First Rule of Female Fighting, which is Ladies Never Punch, she does kick a guy into an electrified grid). But as a psychologist, she's totally unconvincing. As [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) said, "If she thinks those people are 'happy and well-adjusted' she needs to turn in her license." She believes everything Dr. Adams tells her and she agrees to try out an unknown brain-altering technology on her commanding officer. Sorry, honey, I gotta say it: you are no Dr. Dehner.

I had forgotten that this episode brought us the very first Vulcan mindmeld. I'd also forgotten that in this episode, Spock is most reluctant to do it, because he says he's never done it with a human before and it is a special intimate thing for the Vulcan people which is "part of our private lives." Poor guy, he will be mindmelding with everything from humans to Hortas before this tour of duty is over.

Though I join the rest of the world in making fun of Shatner's acting, I will say that his "neural neutralizer" scenes are pretty intense. Like I said, Trek at its best: crude, yet effective.

Next up..."The Corbomite Maneuver"


	10. THE CORBOMITE MANEUVER

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The episode that really should have been broadcast first.

**STARDATE: June 24, 2011**

  
**THE CORBOMITE MANEUVER**   
**Written by: Jerry Sohl**

Or, as I like to call this episode, "When Geometry Attacks!"

This is the first of the "naval battle" episodes, a genre which I have never really liked. It is true that there's not a whole lot of actual battling done, but the focus for a long time is on tactics. Anyway, the main thing that occurred to me watching this episode is that it was probably a lot more effective for people who had lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. But ahead warp factor one...

 

**The Summary:** Spock, Sulu, and a young hothead named Bailey sitting in the other helmsman's chair (which is perhaps the only chair ever built with its own revolving door; there's a different guy in there every time) are engaged in a crushingly boring round of star-mapping when they are suddenly blocked by a terrifying unknown object: a gigantic floating CUBE! Standing on its POINTY END! And...oh my God...it's ROTATING! The cube, while apparently a solid object with no obvious means of propulsion, does a great job of preventing the Enterprise from moving forward. Kirk, after due consideration, decides to charge it; the cube chases them and gets so close that they have to blow it up to avoid being fatally irradiated by it. They continue on, mostly unscathed, until they are confronted by another terrifying unknown object: a gigantic SPHERE made of SMALLER HEMISPHERES! This terrifying unknown object actually has a voice--a voice that sounds, actually, exactly like Fezzik pretending to be the Dread Pirate Roberts. And it says pretty much the same thing: THERE WILL BE NO SURVIVORS! The voice proceeds from "Balok," who is shown on screen as a rippling yet strangely rigid head and neck in that kind of human/insect meld so popular in representations of space aliens. Balok is pissed that the Enterprise blew up his cube and on behalf of *his* federation (Petraus or Phaedrus or something along those lines; I'm sure someone will enlighten me) is going to blow up the Enterprise and everyone in it. However, Balok will give all the Enterprisians 10 minutes to make their peace with whatever deities they pray to first. So, the countdown begins. Bailey, who has never been the coolest head on deck, loses his shit and is relieved of duty. McCoy is pissed off about this because he thinks Kirk promoted Bailey too fast in the first place. Scott is irritated by Sulu's helpful bulletins about how much time they have left. Kirk makes more efforts at diplomacy, none successful. He asks Spock for ideas; Spock says, well, in chess, when you're outmatched this way, you're fucked. Kirk finds this unhelpful. A snarly conversation with the doctor abotu Bailey leads to them using the word "bluff," which gives Kirk the idea of playing poker at this moment instead of chess. He contacts Balok and tells him that the Enterprise, like all federation vessels, has built into it a substance called "corbomite" which will, if the ship is hit, create such a huge opposing reaction that the attacker will be destroyed, and that for the past 200 years no adversary has survived an attach on a federation ship. The countdown reaches zero; there is no apocalypse. After some more poker playing, Balok informs them that they will be towed to a planet and interned there. A small ship comes out from the giant sphere and begins towing the Enterprise. Bailey returns asking to return to duty; for some reason Kirk agrees, so Bailey gets to be part of the highly dramatic sequence in which the Enterprise nearly blows up its engines but does manage to break out of the tractor beam. Then the small ship sends out a distress signal; Uhura thinks it wouldn't be strong enoguh to reach its own mother ship, so Kirk decides to take the high road and beam over along with McCoy and Bailey, who Kirk believes deserves a look at the "face of the unknown." So over they go to the ship, where they discover that the "Balok" they were lookign at on screen is a puppet, and that the real Balok is a bald seven-year-old wearing taped-on shaggy red eyebrows and a silver lame disco elf suit. Balok proves to be quite jolly, and offers his guests his favorite beverage, "Trania." He then explains that this was all just a test to see whether the Enterprise really is peaceful. Balok himself is just lonely, stuck out here manning his federation's gigantic geometric shapes, and wants a chance for conversation and cultural exchange. Bailey volunteers to stay behind for this purpose; Balok leads the three visitors on a tour of his ship. **END SUMMARY**  


 

In the middle of the whole "countdown to death" phase, Kirk gets on the intercom and makes a morale-boosting announcement about how their greatest problem in situations like this is fear of the unknown--but not to worry, "there is no unknown," only that which is "temporarily" hidden from us. And I thought, you arrogant imperialist SOB, thinking the whole created universe can be made clear by your linear binaristic enlightenment thinking, of course there are unknown and unknowable things in the world. And then when they got on board the other ship I thought, you know what, as far as the Star Trek universe goes, he's right. Cause here you are having first contact with an alien being and when he orders up his favorite alien beverage, the banquet-table-skirt curtains part and a plank slides out and look, there's that clear lucite punchbowl and ladle set you just bought on sale at the five and dime! We really ARE all the same at heart!

As I said, I think this episode probably had more resonance during the Cold War, when poker was one of the foundational paradigms of geopolitics. In a way that that's what the Cuban missile crisis was: Khruschev and Kennedy playing poker, for REALLY HIGH STAKES. We have, of course, new shadowy adversaries; but it's not the same. Before 1989, the shadowy adversary was a government with whom ours had (extremely tense) diplomatic relations; though of course everyone gave the Russkies credit for being cheaters, we could at least understand this fight for global dominance as a game in which we knew who the players were and where there were a few rules that both parties had to at least pretend to follow. Nowadays...well, we're not playing chess, the situation's not stable enough for that. Maybe we're still playing poker, only the table keeps hiding and the players are only reachable through the Internet and nobody will tell us whether we're playing five-card stud or 21 or fizzbin or what.

Anyhow, one thing that apparently separates me from a lot of sf/f fans is that I cannot muster much interest in military conflict. I always found battle scenes hard to write for [WOF](http://www.plaidder.com/wof), and I figured out at one point that it was because with a battle, you the author know the outcome, and writing it is basically a logistical exercise: how you get to the right outcome while putting in enough danger, suspense, killing, etc. to satisfy the people reading the story. Whereas with the character development stuff, there's always the chance that as you're writing it something will surprise you. As a TOS viewer, you have a different problem, which is that you know that at no point will the Enterprise actually be destroyed. The only way to create suspense is to engineer a situation where it is REALLY HARD for the viewer to figure out _how_ you will avoid destruction. This is what "The Corbomite Maneuver" attempts.

Some of the problems with "The Corbomite Maneuver" are structural. Since the Enterprise is so overmatched technically, Kirk runs through his playbook pretty quick, which means that there isn't too much that can actually happen before we get to the poker game, which for dramatic effect has to be staved off until the last minute. So the opening is very slow--there is a lot of open-mouthed staring at the screen, and a lot of long shots of the terrifying luminous geometical forms. Now, this is perhaps a point at which it starts to matter that our standards for special effects have changed so much. Perhaps in 1966, it was pretty cool to watch that cube rotate. And this is perhaps why they felt a need to 'update' the exterior SFX; because the episodes budget so much time for people to appreciate these cool SFX that they better be cool or else the pacing doesn't work. But you know what? It's lipstick on a pig. The 1966-era rotating cube, which I figured out I can still see in the un-remastered trailers included on the DVD, was fuzzy and maybe a little dim. The remastered rotating cube is brighter and less fuzzy--and looks exactly like the screensaver on the computer in my oncologist's exam room. From a dramatic point of view, it doesn't help. Ditto for the giant sphere. Hooray, we can now see all kinds of definition on something that otherwise used to look like a big ol' glowing grapefruit. Still not terrifying me.

It also kind of undercuts the whole thing about the terrifying Balok "puppet." Balok creates his 'alter ego' using methods just as crude and about as effective as the ones being used by the original SFX team: he makes an unconvincing model and then films it so it looks bigger. So when Kirk et al find out they've been tricked, it's kind of a neat little metacommentary on the visual tricks being played on the viewer. But in the revised version, for the SFX, they're not using puppets; it's all digital. Sigh.

So, how else to pad this plot out? Well, we can use character stuff; and Sohl does. But it all seemed kind of forced to me, perhaps because most of it is not well integrated into the plot. When the cube shows up, Kirk is down in sickbay getting a physical, which--OF COURSE--requires him to be stripped to the waist and sweating, which gives us a Kirk's Denuded Torso rating of 7 out of 10 (counting the double-nude-Kirks of "What are Little Girls Made Of" as 1.5 and giving a .5 value to the denuded forearms in "Miri"). This sets up a snarky thing with McCoy about Kirk's neglect of his own health and the crew's, during which Yeoman Rand gets her 5 minutes of fame by walking in with Kirk's lunch, which has too many "green leaves" on it because McCoy changed his diet card without telling him. She has another moment of glory toward the end of the episode when she manages to bring Kirk hot coffee despite the fact that the ship's power is out (she heated it with a hand phaser). Though she is once again a stewardess (and I don't mean flight attendant; I mean stewardess), and though there is the obligatory what idiot assigned me a female yeoman/what's the matter don't you trust yourself/I already have a female to worry about and her name is the Enterprise conversation, we can at least now say that there is one episode in which Rand is neither stalked, raped, harassed (though Kirk does tell her not to 'hover' over him, which is of course sexist and insulting), nor forced to bare her lesions while confessing her designs on Kirk. Anyway, apart from the stuff abotu whether Bailey is ready for the helmsman job or not, none of it has any real bearing on the business at hand, so it feels like filler. The Spock/Kirk interaction is better. You can start to see where the original K/S slashers were getting it from; Kirk's joke that he consults with Spock mainly because it makes him feel "secure emotionally" is really quite a charming moment for both of them. Sulu actually gets the best line, after Spock comments drily to Bailey that he should consider having his adrenaline system "removed" if it's that "inconvenient:" "Cross brains with Spock and he'll cut you to pieces every time."

All right, still not at an hour...now what? Well, since I watch these while I exercise and since my exercise program is timed, I had an opportunity to time the "ten minutes" that Balok gives the crew before their impending doom. I can now report that in the future, the "Earth minute" will last at least twice as long as it does now. Each minute will also have its own unique duration, none being exactly as long or as short as any of its fellow minutes.

So. We finally get to the poker game. And this is the payoff for all that earlier stuff. And I have to say, there is something kind of charismatic about Kirk when he's bluffing. This is one reason why "A Piece of the Action" was one of my favorite episodes; watching him make up the rules to fizzbinn is genuinely funny and kind of endearing. So for a few minutes there, when you're watching Kirk pull this ship-saving lie out of his ass (Kirk has a buttcam in this episode, by the way), it's pretty entertaining. Then, they go on over to the alien ship, and...

I dunno. I told [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) she can't read the review before she watches the episode, because there's something just ineffably Star Trek about that moment. The whole "twist" about Balok is just so goofy, and yet you start to feel that the show is very nearly aware of and parodying its own goofiness and that the characters maybe kind of get it. And the use of Clint Howard--younger brother of Ron Howard, IMDB tells me--as Balok is so bizarre. His voice is dubbed to make him sound like an (admittedly elfin) adult, but he's so clearly a child (based on IMDB he would have been seven; he sure has a seven-year-old's set of teeth), and the dubbing is not exactly masterful either, and then there's the trania punchbowl, and...you kind of have to sit there and say, well really, can I be mad about how bad this is? Isn't this what I signed up for?

It's a pity that this twist also totally evacuates the coolness of the actual Corbomite Maneuver. Here they were all stoked that Kirk managed to bluff them out of sudden death when in fact, Balok clearly never intended to destroy the Enterprise in the first place.

Anyway. I note in passing that this is one of the few episodes that doesn't end with them back on the bridge. I also note that several times in this episode Kirk asks the rhetorical question that I have long been asking, which is, "What is the mission of this ship? To seek out, etc." If I am interpreting the data on the DVD correctly, this episode was one of the first made, even though it wasn't shown until later; maybe they were still using it for expositional purposes. Anyway, it is a relief to finally have them go where no man has gone before and seek out a frickin' new civilization already, even if all ends in WTFfery.

Next up: The Menagerie. I have a bad feeling about this.


	11. THE MENAGERIE, PARTS I & II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is really a review of two episodes; "The Menagerie" was the original series' only two-part episode, created as a desperate attempt to fill out the first season schedule in the time allotted. It's pretty crazy, but very interesting, especially in terms of its treatment of disability.

**STARDATE: July 12, 2011**

**THE MENAGERIE parts 1 and 2**  
 **Written by Gene Roddenberry**  
  
 **The Summary:** Lord have mercy.  
  
Look, in case anyone doesn’t already know it, here’s the story on how “The Menagerie” got made. In the process of trying to sell the show to a network, Roddenberry made two pilot episodes for Star Trek. The first pilot, called “The Cage,” had much the same set as ST:TOS but a different cast. The captain was a brunet named Christopher Pike (Jeffrey Hunter), the first officer was a brunette named Number One (played by Majel Barrett), Spock had funny ears and eyebrows but his character was not yet formed, and the doctor was an irascible old coot who carried martini fixings in his medikit. Oh, and the women wore pants. “The Cage” didn’t sell the show. So Roddenberry made a second pilot, this time with Kirk as captain and Sulu and Scott along for the ride (and women still wearing pants). Spock was the only character from “The Cage” who was retained for pilot #2. Pilot #2 sold the show, and was broadcast as the episode [“Where No Man Has Gone Before.”](http://idairsauthor.livejournal.com/38302.html#cutid1)   
  
So, Gene has his show off the ground, and the episodes are rolling off the assembly line, and one fine day Gene wakes up and says to himself, by God, I’m going to get “The Cage” on the air no matter who it kills. But “The Cage” couldn’t be passed off as a canonical episode. People would notice that the captain was completely different and that Spock had been demoted and that the new first officer was an android double of Nurse Chapel with darker hair and blue nail polish. So Gene creates a frame story involving the canonical setting and characters into which he can shoehorn “The Cage.” The end result is ST:TOS’s only two-part episode, “The Menagerie.”   
  
(On edit: [](http://glaurung-quena.livejournal.com/profile)[**glaurung_quena**](http://glaurung-quena.livejournal.com/) informs me that the reason they recycled "The Cage" is that they were behind schedule and overbudget and this was the only way to catch up: they were basically able to make 2 episodes in the time and for the price it would normally take to make one. I'm sure this is true; but I think the treatment of "The Cage" within "The Menagerie" shows that Gene was also still in love with his first pilot. Read on.)   
  
Why am I going over all this? Well, gentle reader, when I first saw “The Menagerie,” I didn’t know any of this. So I know that unless you know why “The Menagerie” was made, much of it doesn’t make a lick of sense. My memories of “The Menagerie” are confused and fragmentary, and I appear to have forgotten the entire embedded narrative. Except for the green Orion slave woman. Her I remember.   
  
What green Orion slave woman, you ask.  
  
Get a sandwich and a bag of chips, this will take a while.  
  
 **The Summary:** Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to a starbase where they are met by the interestingly pointless Miss Piper, whose only function seems to be smiling roguishly at Kirk. (There’s so much stuffed into “The Menagerie” that there’s no time for a Kirk love interest, so I guess she’s there just to reassure us that Kirk’s magical heterosexuality has not waned.) Kirk says the Enterprise received an urgent message asking them to divert to this starbase; Miss Piper and Commodore Mendez, the brass hat in charge, say no such message was sent. While trying to clear this up, Kirk discovers that the first captain of the Enterprise, Christopher Pike, has been severely disabled by an explosion. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy visit him and are shocked to see that he is confined to a motorized life support chair that obscures everything but his head, neck, and shoulders; his face is disfigured and he seems to have aged about 90 years. (Conveniently, this allows them to forget about securing Jeffrey Hunter again and cast a totally different actor as Pike.) Pike’s brain, apparently, is fine; but he can’t communicate, except by making a light on his chair blink once for yes and twice for no. Spock, who served under Pike 13 years earlier, asks for some time alone with Pike. He then tells Pike that he has concocted a secret plan that involves mutiny but he’s sure it will work. Pike keeps blinking no.   
  
Kirk suspects that something is up with Spock; McCoy defends him, informing us in the process that Vulcans can’t lie and are loyal to the death. If that’s true, Spock’s human half must be one lying, treacherous sonofabitch. In no time at all Spock decoys McCoy back to the Enterprise with a fake medical emergency, abducts Captain Pike, fabricates a message from Kirk telling the crew he’s turning command over to Spock for a top secret mission, locks the navigational computer into a flight plan which cannot be changed without blowing up the ship, and takes the Enterprise out of orbit, leaving Kirk stranded on the starbase. (Sadly, there is no overhead shot of Kirk looking skyward shaking his fists and screaming “SPOOOOOOOOOOOCK!!!!!!”). The Enterprise heads off to Talos 4, a planet Pike visited with the Enterprise thirteen years ago. We know nothing about Talos 4 except that a) it has its own TOP SECRET file (in the future, classified documents will be the only things still written on paper and stored in three-ring binders) b) General Order Seven makes attempting to travel to or communicate with Talos 4 a crime punishable by death and c) Spock is hell-bent on using the Enterprise to take Captain Pike there.  
  
Kirk and Commodore Mendez jump aboard a shuttlecraft and give chase. One cannot, of course, catch a starship in a shuttlecraft; what Kirk does is drive the shuttle until it is just about out of power, knowing that rather than let them die Spock will bring them aboard. Which he does—after calling a security team to the bridge and telling McCoy that he (Spock) needs to be arrested for mutiny. A baffled McCoy orders Spock confined to quarters. Kirk discovers he can’t change the ship’s course without compromising life support; so the ship continues on toward the Forbidden Planet while Kirk convenes a hearing to investigate Spock’s recent activities. This gets us just about to the end of part 1.  
  
And this is where it gets weird.  
  
Spock waives the hearing and demands to be courtmartialed. The court martial consists of Kirk, Mendez, and Pike. Mendez asks Spock why the fuck he’s doing this. Spock then forces Kirk, Mendez, and Pike to watch “The Cage.”  
  
That isn’t how anyone puts it; but that’s what happens. There are breaks for expostulation and for turns of the screw, but essentially they all sit there and watch most of that damn pilot. Of course what Spock says is that they are watching images of what happened on the Enterprise’s first visit to Talos 4 13 years ago. So here we go. Computer, enabled embedded narrative summarization device.  
  
 **/EMBEDDED NARRATIVE SUMMARY/**  
  
The Enterprise, under the leadership of Captain Christopher Pike, receives a distress call from a ship that was lost around 18 years ago. Pike takes a landing party down to Talos 4 in search of survivors, leaving Number One in charge of the Enterprise. There they find a camp of grizzled shipwreck survivors. Grizzled, that is, except for Vina, a young blonde whose striking good looks are only partly canceled out by her oddly anachronistic ‘80s look. Vina takes Pike to a secluded Styrofoam mountain and promptly disappears. A door in Mount Styrofoam opens and three Talosians rush out. (Talosians are pallid humanoids with enormous bald lightbulb-shaped crania decked out with pulsing varicose veins; all of them wear identical body-concealing floor-length gray robes made of some hideous synthetic semi-iridescent fabric. From behind, their crania have vertical cleavage, making the Talosians—literally—buttheads.) They blast Pike with some kind of ray and drag him back through the concealed door. The survivors’ camp then disappears. Spock et al. realize that It Was A Trap.  
  
OK, I’ll try to make the rest as painless as possible.  
  
The Talosians used to live on the surface, but after war rendered it uninhabitable they retreated underground, where to compensate for their crappy subterranean existence they worked on developing telepathy. They learned how to get into people’s heads and create illusions based on memories, dreams, fantasies, and fears. These illusions are in every way as sensually convincing as reality. The awesomeness of these illusions led to them to lose interest in the physical world. The planet surface has started to recover, but the Talosians are no longer capable of physical labor; so their plan is to create a race of human slaves who can farm and whatnot. They’ve already got Vina; but they need a human male to breed with her, and that’s what Pike is for.  
  
Pike is kept in an underground cell behind a transparent barrier while the Talosians (the one he usually interacts with is called the Keeper) use their powers of illusion to make him fall for Vina. First they make Pike relive a traumatic battle on Rigel VII which involves saving Vina from barbarians wearing all kinds of crazy fake fur. Then they put Vina into a fantasy in which he quits Starfleet and goes home to have picnics in the woods with his horses. Vina then decides that what he really needs is a fantasy where he doesn’t have to be a starship captain and uphold, you know, moral standards and shit like that. So here comes another scenario in which he’s an Orion slave trader lounging poolside on a set someone stole out of the dumpster behind the lot where they made Ben Hur, and she’s a green Orion slave woman wearing leafy underwear and doing the best belly-dance routine that poor Susan Oliver could execute while covered in spinach-hued body paint. Pike flees, but she follows; and this time, it appears, she and Pike might actually do the deed. Sadly, at this moment, Number One and the redheaded Yeoman Colt, who is supposed to be hot for Pike and have “exceptionally strong female drives” (how painful to discover that the randy yeoman character was as foundational to the series as Spock was), appear in Pike’s cell, offered to him by the Talosians as alternative breeding partners. Pike, who has figured out that “primitive thoughts” block the Talosians’ telepathy, manages to drag the Keeper into the cell and choke the shit out of him/her (the Keeper was played by a woman but voiced by a man; none of the Talosians have obvious sexual characteristics and I can’t remember what pronouns they use), forcing the Keeper to release their minds so they can escape. They make it to the planet surface, where Number One prepares to blow herself and her fellow-captives up rather than be forced to create a race of human slaves—which, as she says, “would be wrong.” More Talosians arrive and pronounce that humans’ uniquely intense hatred of captivity makes them unsuitable for this project. The Talosians let them go, noting that this will doom them (the Talosians) to extinction. Pike wants to take Vina with him. She says she can’t leave. As Pike discovers to his horror, Vina’s youth, health, and beauty are a Talosian illusion. Vina was severely injured in the original crash 18 years ago; the Talosians reconstructed her, but they didn’t know what humans were supposed to look like, so they did it wrong. Vina doesn’t want to go back home all old and misshapen; and Pike sure as hell doesn’t want to take her back home that way. So he and his crew beam back aboard the Enterprise and away they go, leaving Vina and Talos 4 behind.  
  
 **/END EMBEDDED NARRATIVE SUMMARY. ENGAGING FRAME NARRATIVE SUMMARY/**  
  
So, remember, Kirk, Mendez, and Pike have all been watching all this during Spock’s courtmartial. Spock makes it clear that the whole point of his scheme was to get Pike back to Talos 4 where the Talosians have agreed to give him the same deal Vina has: Pike gets to have the illusion of youth, health, and able-bodiedness despite his physical condition. Kirk asks Pike if Pike wants this. Pike blinks yes. Kirk turns to Mendez to get his opinion. Mendez disappears. Turns out Mendez was a Talosian illusion; he was never in the shuttlecraft to start with. The whole courtmartial was fabricated by Spock and the Talosians to distract Kirk so the ship could get to Talos 4. A communication comes in from Uhura: Starfleet command has also been watching this mysterious transmission from Talos 4, and they are so moved by it that they have decided to suspend General Order 7 just this once. Pike can go to Talos 4 if he wants; Spock will not be prosecuted. Spock wheels Pike off to the transporter room. A relieved and amused Kirk says that after Pike’s disposed of he wants to talk to Spock about this “tendency toward flagrant emotionalism” he’s been exhibiting; Spock says “I see no reason to be insulted,” and trundles Pike off. Kirk is left in the hearing room, where he sees the Keeper on screen saying that Kirk’s got reality and Pike’s got illusions and they only hope Kirk has a good a time in the real world as they’re all gonna be having in illusionland. The last thing we see is an image on screen of the young Pike and the young Vina headed hand in hand into Mount Styrofoam, while Kirk looks on with a kind of baffled smile. THANK GOD, WE HAVE REACHED THE END AT LAST.  
  
I summarized this one for [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) because I feared that watching it might drive her mad. When I was explaining the Talosians’ decline she said, “So, basically, they watched too much TV.” And in a way that’s what both “The Cage” and “The Menagerie” are about: TV.   
  
One thing I found highly irritating and yet poignant about the frame narrative is how much of a fuss Kirk and the other characters make over “The Cage.” After the first few minutes of Spock’s “evidence,” Kirk interrupts and tells Spock that this can’t possibly be a record of actual events because no ship makes record tapes that detailed. He’s right. He’s even righter than he knows; most of “The Cage” is made up of illusions that didn’t ‘really’ exist and therefore could not have been filmed. “The Cage” is presented to the “Menagerie” characters as exactly what it was always intended to be: a stream of fabricated but enthralling images broadcast into space by a faraway station and received simultaneously by multiple viewers. In other words, a TV show. As in the bad old days before cable, VCRs, DVDs, TiVo, streaming video, YouTube, and so on, the “viewers” have little control over what they’re watching. The Talosians transmit when they feel like it; and if Kirk and Pike don’t happen to want to watch “The Cage,” tough, because there’s nothing else on. TV in general is represented in “The Menagerie” as an advanced alien technology so marvelous that we are powerless to control it.  
  
But the frame story doesn’t just force Kirk et al. to watch “The Cage.” It renders “The Cage” the best goddamn TV show ever made. Every time we come back from commercial in Part II Kirk is given a voiceover in which he expresses his awe and amazement at this “unusual kind of evidence.” Spock’s entire plan is founded on the assumption that “The Cage” is so powerful that nobody can view it and remain unaffected. Spock begs Kirk to allow him to continue showing “The Cage” as if completing this broadcast will save the universe. Not only is Kirk so profoundly fascinated and moved by “The Cage” that he is willing to forget about the fact that Spock planned and carried out a mutiny, but Starfleet command is so affected that they waive “the only death penalty still on our books” just so Pike can have the happy ending that “The Cage” promises him. This is not only must-see TV, not only no-I-really-mean-you-have-no-fucking-choice-and-must-see-TV, but TV that melts hearts, changes laws, and inspires universal forgiveness. This is TV that heals the sick. It’s only because of “The Cage” that Spock is able to bring Pike back to Talos 4 and thus allow the Talosians to restore him to youth, health, and beauty. Sort of.  
  
So “The Menagerie” is a fantasy which contains a fantasy about fantasies. The outer layer of fantasy—the fantasy about “The Cage” changing the world—is something which I, as a fellow lunatic fan of [my own crazy created world,](http://www.plaidder.com/wof/) can sort of sympathize. The inner layers of this onion are a different story.  
  
I must begin by giving Gene his due: He learned from experience. The first half of this episode—the one devoted mostly to the frame story—is about a thousand times more effective than the second. Now that’s partly because the ‘resolution’ of the frame story is a thermonuclear disaster; but it’s mainly because the characters and actors in the actual show are just better than the ones in the first pilot. Spock’s plan is pretty well-constructed and it’s kind of neat to see him prove that he’s the smartest mofo on the Enterprise even while you are simultaneously outraged at his lyin’ cheatin’ and stealin’. The McCoy/Spock stuff is great. I particularly enjoyed Spock’s turning himself in to McCoy. (“Will confinement to quarters be enough?”) Kirk acquits himself decently, bar the patronizing BS at the end. Yeoman Rand does not appear, and Uhura is even given a couple semi-important things to do. The TOS cast is starting to come together as an ensemble and the relationships are well-developed enough that you can get invested in questions of betrayal and divided loyalties.  
  
The rot doesn’t really set in until Spock’s courtmartial. Roddenberry has real trouble clothing the nakedness of this plot device. You keep wondering why Kirk is willing to spend an hour sitting there watching Talosian TV while his ship, no longer under his own control, hurtles toward a destination he desperately doesn’t want it to reach. Then there is the matter of “The Cage” itself.  
  
First of all, William Shatner is a lot more fun to watch than Jeffrey Hunter. Sure, in absolute terms, William Shatner is not a very good actor. But when you compare him to what else was on TV in the 60s—or even to what else is on TV right now—he comes out pretty well. He’s no Patrick Stewart, but he’s no Mark Hamill either. Hunter, on the other hand, runs the gamut of facial expressions from A to A, has no discernible sense of humor, and is angrier and broodier than Heathcliff and Rochester put together. He’s just Another Square-Jawed Hero. As Kirk, Shatner did have a certain je ne sais quoi, or as [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) put it, a je ne sais WTF?  
  
Number One, meanwhile, was a major disappointment. Nimoy said in his little featurette that for “The Cage,” it was Number One who was supposed to be the logical, unemotional character. (Since she doesn’t apparently have a name, for a long time I assumed that this Number One character was intended to be an android or cyborg or some such. No, she’s just a woman without emotions, which I guess is futuristic and fantastical enough.) My suspicion is that they told Majel Barrett this and she assumed that to play an unemotional character you should never get excited. Even when she’s preparing to commit suicide she seems oddly detached from her own dialogue. But all this does is make Number One boring and make Barrett look amateurish. My crackpot theory is that “unemotional” characters work only when the spectators are led to assume that these characters do actually _have_ emotions, but for whatever reason do not _express_ them. This is why it’s so important that Spock is half-human; everyone (other characters as well as spectators) is always looking for evidence of those hidden emotions. Spock thus demonstrates that a character who doesn’t express emotion can be fascinating. But a character who genuinely doesn’t _have_ emotions is a drag; and as Majel Barrett played her, that’s what Number One was. This is obviously partly because in order to do a man’s job, Number One (naturally) had to evacuate herself of all her feminine qualities, including the ability to feel. When she and Yeoman Colt are brought into the cage, the Keeper says that they have complementary qualities—Number One is intelligent; Yeoman Colt has those “strong female drives.” These things are—of course!—diametrically opposed, and the strong implication is that Pike is supposed to mate with both of them, perhaps at the same time, preferably while the Keeper watches.  
  
Speaking of buttheads who like to watch brings us to the inner layers of the fantasy onion. As the star of the Keeper’s very own soft-porn film, Pike occupies the position in which poor Grace Lee Whitney found herself, where he is thrown against his will into sexual scenarios which he must then act out, humiliated by the knowledge that an invisible and hostile audience is watching this and getting off on it. Being a hero, of course, he’s not constantly facing the threat of rape. What he’s threatened with is something apparently far more terrifying: domestication.  
  
Pike at one point goes on a rant about how the Talosians don’t just want him to have sex with Vina, they’re trying to get him to fall in love, and that this would only be necessary if they were trying to start a “family group.” In addition to being an excuse to act out a string of male sexual fantasies, “The Cage” is driven by an apparently profound masculine fear of being “trapped” into one of these ‘family groups.’ For evidence that such a fear is deeply embedded in American culture, I need only refer you to the runaway success of The Hangover. What the Talosians are trying to do is not rape him but rather manipulate him into choosing a partner and raising children with her—which apparently, from a certain masculine point of view, is a fate worse than death. Vina is portrayed as complicit in this project—she is in love with Captain Pike, and hysterically vaunts her ability to be any woman Pike can dream of in terms reminiscent of “The Man-Trap.” She is given some redeeming features—she answers Pike’s questions about the Talosians honestly, appears generally compassionate toward him, and has clearly suffered through a much longer period of captivity and torture—but basically she wants to trap him as much as the Keeper does. Through the race-of-human-slaves breeding plan, the “family group” is rendered as coercive, degrading, and degraded an institution as possible; you know Number One is manly enough to be a first officer because she’d rather die than experience it. Domesticity is as horrifying a “cage” as that Talosian cell and Pike is equally committed to getting the hell out of it.   
  
Of course, this would be domesticity with a twist, since Vina has the ability to become any woman while also somehow remaining herself. Which, as we already know from “The Man-Trap,” makes her every man’s ultimate fantasy. And speaking of masculine fantasies…let’s talk about that green Orion slave woman.   
  
It’s been a couple weeks and I don’t have the DVD here to re-watch it, but I’m pretty sure that when the subject first came up during the ship’s doctor’s heart-to-heart with Pike on the Enterprise, the wording used was “green animal slave women.” In the actual green Orion slave woman fantasy, these beings are described as “vicious” and it is said that “no human male can resist them.” And as I watched Jolly Green Vina gyrate and Pike salivate, I exclaimed to myself, “Is it that hard for you guys to take responsibility for your own arousal?”   
  
And I guess it is. Cause if guys had to take responsibility for their own arousal, it’d be a different world, wouldn’t it? We could all just take it for granted that you know what, women are pretty hot, but the dick belongs to the guy and so the guy’s gotta own what he does with it. And I guess that could help explain why guys like Gene Roddenberry invent creatures like the green (animal) Orion slave woman—or like Mudd’s pill-popping women—or like the salt-sucking siren of “The Man-Trap.” Women (or animals) who are just so goddamn sexually alluring that “no man can resist” them and therefore no man can be held responsible for what he does with or to them.   
  
In the same way that, say, vampires were used by Bram Stoker to make it possible for his good Victorian women to experience some pretty kinky stuff without having their virtue tarnished (they can’t help it; vampires have strange powers), the green Orion slave woman is used to allow Pike to finally submit to Vina’s advances and let himself be trapped without compromising his masculine hatred of captivity (he can’t help it; she’s a green Orion slave woman for Christ’s sake!). Which may actually be what Pike wants, since he admits that he was attracted to Vina the moment he saw her.   
  
Of course, Pike at that point has never seen the real Vina. And this brings us (at last!) to the horrendous conclusions of both “The Cage” and “The Menagerie.”   
  
The whole “is it real or is it a dream/illusion/hallucination/holosuite program gone haywire” plot, so beloved of all the Star Treks, capitalizes on the fact that for the viewers, the characters’ “reality” is no more or less real from a sensory standpoint than whatever illusion the characters have been sucked into. The “reality” and the “illusion” are produced using the same techniques and can be rendered absolutely indistinguishable in terms of how they look and sound. So it’s easy to trick the viewer into thinking something’s “real” when it’s the illusion, or vice versa; and there are lots of fun ways to yank the viewer’s chain. And since the viewers signed up for chain-yanking as soon as they turned on their TVs, if you do it well, they don’t mind. In fact, they love it. Witness, on the film side of things, the success of _The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects, Inception,_ and all those other “twist” movies.  
  
The problem is that writers are often tempted to make the “not-real” world so real to the viewers that by the time you get to the resolution, the illusion world’s gravitational pull has opened up giant black holes in the "reality." In "The Cage," the most glaring example is the treatment of Vina's body. The Talosians want to use Vina to generate an entire race of human slaves. (The fact that this will involve rampant incest is delicately passed over, just as it is in Genesis.) To do this, she’ll need to have a lot of children. Now when this plan is first revealed, we all believe that Vina is young and healthy and hot, so this seems plausible. The resolution of “The Cage,” however, reveals that Vina is much older; it’s hard to say exactly how much, though visual cues push her toward “withered postmenopausal hag” territory. (Since we’ve now seen three episodes—two of them written by Roddenberry—in which young and hot women morph to reveal their ‘real’ and unhot selves, I can say that Vina is not as withered and disgusting as the salt-sucking hag from “The Man-Trap” but definitely older and uglier than the withdrawal-phase “Mudd’s Women”). Her body has also been significantly altered by the Talosians’ implausibly inept reconstructive surgery (where were their awesome telepathic powers then, huh?). How, physically, is the ‘real’ Vina going to bear enough children to create this race of slaves? Apparently, nobody asked Gene this question; or if they did, he just banked on nobody thinking about this episode for more than 30 seconds after it was over. Or maybe the Talosians have actually forgotten that they only control perception and cannot alter material reality. Kind of like Karl Rove.  
  
The conclusion of “The Menagerie” has the same problem: the vanishing illusion takes a lot of reality with it. We’re supposed to believe, for instance, that Mendez has been a Talosian illusion since he got on the shuttlecraft on the starbase with Kirk. The Talosians can do their mind-control thing from that far away? If that’s true, what’s to stop them ruling the entire universe? And there are worse crimes against credibility—such as the fact that the Talosians, who seemed to have a real taste for torturing Pike, are going to extreme lengths to help him; that Spock has been in contact with the Talosians long enough to plan this without anyone ever knowing it; and that Kirk, the guy who commands from his evil side (as we know from “The Enemy Within”), brushes off a frickin’ mutiny by his senior officer with a smile and a lame joke. Yes, because that’s what you want when you’re captaining a spaceship lightyears from earth: for your crew to know that it’s OK to mutiny as long as they can prove they had a really good reason. No, what we see at the end of “The Menagerie” is not so much a resolution as a waving of the magic wand. Sorry kids, we’ve already got 30 pounds of episode in a 20 pound bag here, we didn’t have time to finish this cool mutiny plot we spent an hour setting up. But hey, you love Spock, right? So don’t look a gift pardon in the mouth.   
  
More disturbing and (to me anyway) equally preposterous is the assumption that life on Talos 4 is, for the disabled Pike and Vina, a happy ending. Life on Talos 4 is not all picnics and green Orion slave women, my friends. Both Vina and Pike are telepathically tortured by their keepers. For eighteen years they treat Vina like a slave or a prize brood sow, and for the time that they have Pike in their control they do their best to break him. So, at the end of “The Cage,” Vina says no thanks, I want to remain with my captors…and Pike says, you know what, you’re right. Because clearly, being disabled and no longer young is SO MUCH WORSE than captivity, torture, mindfuckery, and being sexually and reproductively exploited by beings more powerful than you are.   
  
I would add, “If you’re a woman”…but Roddenberry’s fear of disability is so much stronger than his sexism that in this area Star Trek has almost achieved gender parity. “The Menagerie’s” treatment of the disabled Captain Pike is if anything worse than “The Cage’s” treatment of the disabled Vina, if only because it goes on for longer. Though Roddenberry could imagine technology that would allow the paralyzed Pike to work a flashing light with his brainwaves, he couldn’t imagine technology that would allow Pike to use this flashing light to, say, spell out words. So the disabled Pike’s thoughts and feelings are almost entirely inaccessible; and when he is able to communicate, everyone ignores him. Mendez knows Pike doesn’t want visitors, but this doesn’t stop him from showing him to Kirk, Spock, and McCoy as if he was a zoo exhibit. When Spock tells Pike his plan, Pike blinks “No.” Now Spock clearly interpreted that as “no, don’t sacrifice yourself for me, of course I would love to spend the rest of my life on Talos 4 but I can’t ask you to do that for me,” and Spock nobly ignores him. But since Pike keeps blinking “no” for hours afterward, it would make just as much sense to read it more along the lines of, “DON’T LET THIS CRAZY VULCAN BASTARD FUCKING DO THIS TO ME!!!” Then, at the end of the episode, the fact that he blinks "yes" when asked if he wants to spend the rest of his life on Talos 4 is supposed to make it OK that Spock has kidnapped his paralyzed former captain--who, let's remember, is being kept alive by life support integrated into that chair--and brought him out to a proscribed planet against his will, and is now going to leave him in the custody of the buttheaded bastards who tortured him 13 years earlier and who as we know from "The Cage" cannot fix machines when they break.   
  
Both resolutions, in fact, assume that being disabled is, if not a fate worse than death, at least a fate so awful that only complete withdrawal into a fantasy world can make it bearable. For the ending of either “The Cage” or “The Menagerie” to work, you have to believe that the disabled body itself is a more terrifying prison than any other cage.   
  
Next up: “The Conscience of the King.” It will be a while, though.


	12. THE CONSCIENCE OF THE KING

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Roddenberry often said that the two characters on which Kirk was modeled are Horatio Hornblower and Hamlet. This episode is the first real attempt to develop the Hamlet analogy. With what results, I will discuss.
> 
> The Trek grapevine has it that some of the things I complain about below re the use of Shakespeare in this episode can be laid at Roddenberry's door. Word is he thought "too much Shakespeare" would be too hard for either the network execs or the audience to handle. Either way, in Star Trek's first encounter with the Bard, both come out rather the worse for wear.

**STARDATE: July 19, 2011**

**THE CONSCIENCE OF THE KING**  
 **Written by Barry Trivers**  
  
I’m pretty sure I never saw this one before. I’m pretty sure I would have remembered it. For better or for worse.  
  
 **The Summary:** Kirk diverts the Enterprise to an Earth colony on planet Q because his friend Dr. Leighton has told him he has discovered a synthetic food which will eliminate the risk of famine facing space colonies (in the future, the ability to turn energy into food will make famine obsolete…eventually). Kirk meets up with Leighton at a performance of what looks like a wrist-slittingly awful production of Macbeth and discovers that in fact, what Leighton—who is shot exclusively in profile until it’s time to reveal to us that he was Horribly Scarred by the Past and now wears a black satin eyepatch that has colonized an entire side of his head—wants to do is show Kirk that Anton Karidian, the principal actor of the company they’re now watching, is really Kodos the Executioner. Twenty years earlier, Kodos, then governor of an Earth colony on Planet Star Name Plus Number, responded to a severe food shortage by dividing the colony’s population in half and then executing the “weaker” half so that the “stronger” half could share the remaining food. There are only nine surviving witnesses who can identify Kodos, including Leighton, Kirk, and (it is later discovered) Lt. Kevin “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen” Riley. At the cocktail party to which Leighton has invited Karidian’s company, Kirk meets Karidian’s nineteen year old daughter Lenore, the company’s lead actress. After exchanging “flirtatious banter” that has all the subtlety of a photon torpedo, Kirk and Lenore leave the party and are out for a stroll in the moonlight when—just before the clinch—Kirk spots the crumpled body of Leighton sticking out from behind a Styrofoam knoll. Kirk manages to get the entire company of players on board the Enterprise, promising to transport them to their next stop.  
  
Spock finds Kirk’s behavior suspicious and, via the computer’s databanks, works out for himself that a) there’s no record of Karidian’s existence before Kodos’s “death” b) Kirk and Riley are the last two witnesses left alive because c) the other seven have all died…and curiously enough, each of them died shortly after the Karidian traveling players came to town. Two assassination attempts against Riley and Kirk fail. Spock confronts Kirk; Kirk confronts Karidian, administering a “voice matching” test in which he makes Karidian read Kodos’s execution order. The Karidian troupe’s performance of Hamlet takes place. McCoy discovers that Riley has absconded with a phaser. Kirk tracks Riley down backstage at the play and disarms him. Kirk then overhears Lenore confessing—or rather boasting—to Karidian that she is the one who’s been bumping off the witnesses. Kirk brings security to arrest both; Lenore grabs a phaser and, attempting to shoot Kirk with it, nails her father instead. Figuring what the hell, she’s already dressed up as Ophelia, Lenore promptly goes mad. Kirk disarms her, and then we’re back on the bridge. McCoy confirms that Lenore is batshit crazy, remembers nothing about her father’s death, and is being sent to some sort of institution where she’ll get “the best of care” (hey, try Tantalus…I hear they have some awesome new progressive therapeutic techniques), and tries to get Kirk to admit that he “really cared for” Lenore before they go ahead warp factor one. The End.  
  
Ah, Shakespeare. My old nemesis.  
  
I love Shakespeare. I’ve spent many a happy hour at performances of his plays. One of my best memories from my family’s London phase was going to see Derek Jacobi in Richard III with my sister (I got her there by telling her that Richard III was just like J. R. Ewing). Two of my favorite movies are Kenneth Branagh adaptations of Shakespeare plays. (I speak of Much Ado about Nothing and Henry V, not the horror that was his Hamlet.) The characters, the drama, the beauty of the language, etc. etc. etc.  
  
I also hate Shakespeare. Or perhaps I should say, I hate Shakespeare™. I especially hate the way the ability to groove on Shakespeare is treated in both high and popular culture as an essential proof of one’s humanity. I hate the way people sprinkle Shakespearean references around in order to brighten up otherwise dismal texts. And most of all—most especially—I hate the way everyone knows how great Shakespeare is, but if you pulled 8 out of 10 of those Shakespeare-loving people aside and asked them to name another English-language playwright whose work they enjoy, they couldn’t do it. It’s like, suppose you were a food critic. You like chocolate cake. But there are so many other desserts out there that are so much more interesting and complex and tasty than chocolate cake and you really like a lot of them. You try very hard, in your work as a food critic, to interest people in these awesome confections. And they might try one now and again, but every time, you hear them saying to each other, “Well, that was interesting…but it’s not as good as chocolate cake.” You can see, can’t you, how you might really start to hate chocolate cake, even though it’s not the chocolate cake’s fault?  
  
Maybe not. Anyway.  
  
I also hate it how from TOS you would think that all human literature written between the Renaissance and 2527 was lost in a fire. Because if you have Kirk remember a line from, say, a Virginia Woolf novel, then you are instantly great-ifying Virginia Woolf by implying that she Stood the Test of Time. And mostly the TOS writers were either too chickenshit to great-ify modern or contemporary writers, or they just didn’t care enough. But since everyone has already agreed that Shakespeare has Stood the Test of Time, quoting him is no-risk, plus it convinces people you have culture and that the episode you are scattering Shakespeare all over is a worthy artistic product.  
  
Since the TNG cast was anchored by a Shakespearean actor, the use of Shakespeare got more sophisticated. But in “The Conscience of the King,” we are dealing strictly with Shakespeare™. The costuming for both Macbeth and Hamlet is strongly reminiscent of photos I’ve seen of 60s-era productions—unconvincing period garb plus outrageous 60s hair and makeup. It’s a bizarre aesthetic, and I’m glad its day has passed.  
  
Now, there’s a lot of negative coming up, so let me lead with the good stuff for once: The best thing about this episode is the development of McCoy and Spock’s…friendship, working relationship, frenemance, call it what you will. McCoy is the one Spock goes to when he figures out what’s up with Kirk, and it’s so much fun to see them play off each other. In their first conversation McCoy is sitting down to “a drop of the dew” and we learn both that Vulcans can’t drink and that McCoy seems genuinely sad to know that he’ll never have the chance to get drunk with Spock. Spock’s dismissal of McCoy’s contention that Riley’s poisoning might have been an accident is priceless: “Someday, Doctor, I must explain to you the difference between the empirical method and stubbornness.” Most interesting is the hallway conversation in which an evidently emotionally excited Spock relays the details of Kodos's massacre to a far less agitated McCoy. On the surface you would say this is out of character for both of them; but in fact it makes sense. Spock, having been raised on Vulcan, is still capable of being shocked by human atrocities; McCoy, being as we all seem to assume an old Southerner, is just as disgusted as Spock but not at all surprised. The two of them also seem to recognize that each stands in loco parentis to the inspired child who’s actually running the ship, and it’s neat to see them coming together to try to help him.  
  
And now…well, let’s get the Shakespeare stuff out of the way first.  
  
Although we start off with _Macbeth,_ that doesn’t matter much except to furnish Kirk with one of the worst pickup lines in the history of the galaxy (“So…Lady Macbeth. Interesting.”). There are a couple of stray references to _Julius Caesar._ The only important intertext here is _Hamlet._ Gene Roddenberry claims that the models for Kirk’s character were Horatio Hornblower and Hamlet. That may explain why Kirk turned out so weird; but at any rate, Barry Trivers evidently read the character synopsis because he quite obviously sets Kirk up as Hamlet. Hamlet’s whole problem, you may remember, is that he has been told by the ghost of his murdered father to avenge his father’s death by killing his uncle Claudius, now married to Hamlet’s mother Gertrude. But Hamlet hesitates to act, partly because he wants to be REALLY SURE that Claudius actually did kill his father. Kirk, similarly, is about the only character in this episode who is never 100% sure that Karidian really is Kodos. Long after Spock is convinced, Kirk is still looking for proof, rejecting even the results of the voice match. And like Hamlet, Kirk sets up a trap where the players act out a drama exactly like the Kodos massacre and then he watches to see how Karidian reacts because…oh, wait. No. He totally doesn’t do that.  
  
That’s what pisses me off. For the first 45 minutes, this episode is all about getting you psyched to see Kirk set up a mousetrap for Karidian. And then…no mousetrap.  
  
All right, so, in _Hamlet,_ Hamlet asks a troupe of traveling players to perform a play about the murder of a king which Hamlet has edited so that it rather obviously duplicates the alleged murder of Hamlet Sr. by Claudius. His idea is that when Claudius watches his own crime acted out, he will either confess or give away some evidence of his guilt. “The play’s the thing,” says Hamlet at the end of that particular soliloquy, “wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” This stratagem is sometimes referred to as the mousetrap, and it is very interesting for many reasons, one of them being that Hamlet sabotages his own plan by MST3King the play so pointedly that by the time Claudius walks out you don’t know whether he’s responding to the play itself or to Hamlet’s assholery.  
  
Kirk acts throughout as if he has some master plan for getting Kodos to expose himself, and we assume that this will involve the traveling players’ performance. And in fact, the shit does hit the fan during the play…but not because of anything Kirk does. The only reason Kodos is finally unveiled is that Lenore arbitrarily chooses to blurt out her confession at a time when Kirk is fortuitously around to hear it. So as a mystery, this plot is tremendously unsatisfying. Kirk is a crappy detective—he doesn’t uncover anything everyone else hasn’t already figured out—and there is no link between the investigation and the resolution.  
  
As a thriller it's not working either. The attempt to blow up Kirk’s quarters using a phaser on overload planted behind the “red alert” window does generate some suspense (though it’s unfortunate that the sound department rendered the “low hum” of a phaser on overload as a high-pitched whine). The attempt to poison Riley is cheesified into comedy. Riley has been banished to the depths of Engineering (for his own protection, though he doesn’t know it; he keeps complaining that nobody will tell him what he’s been demoted for, and I keep thinking, maybe you should have picked a different song to croon into the intercom while you were mutinying) and calls up to the rec room from his lonely spot to ask someone to talk to him. While Uhura performs another musical number for him over the intercom (I guess being the designated ship’s songstress is somehow included under the heading of “communications”?), the Ominous Moving Shadow stalks up behind him and poisons his milk with…a spray mist bottle. Seriously, you can almost see the word “WINDEX” under the white-out. Were spray mist bottles still considered exotic technology in 1966? Since even Karidian is making only a half-hearted effort to pretend he’s not Kodos (when Kirk gives him the script of Kodos’s execution speech to read, Karidian performs most of it from memory) the audience does not share Kirk’s doubts, so the is-he-or-isn’t-he thing doesn’t generate much suspense. Lenore’s confession, which is supposed to be the big reveal, falls flat because it’s an answer to a question nobody has yet thought to ask (Is Kodos killing these guys or is someone else doing it?).  
  
All  right, well, maybe the point is just to explore the implications of persecuting a man for something horrible he did twenty years ago. In that case, I wish Trivers had spent some more time working out the details of this massacre—at least in his own head. It is both depressing and heartening to know that in the future, the military will actually care about the deaths of a measly 4000 people (whereas we know that, in the recent past, 4000 innocent dead was just a bad week in Baghdad). But there has been no attempt to imagine the massacre as its own event—as a part of these characters’ reality—rather than as an allegorical representation of Nazi atrocities. There’s no explanation for why Kirk was there (at the age of what, 14?), what happened to him, or how he survived. (One imagines that many of the colonists must have longed to kill the 14 year old Kirk even before the famine.) Kirk refuses to discuss it. The details we get—mostly from Spock—are inconsistent. Spock, for instance, says that the victims who were executed died quickly and painlessly. So how did Leighton lose an eye and half of his face? Kodos initially killed half the population, but he’s also described as having wiped out almost the whole colony; so what happened to the other half? This was all 20 years ago, so Riley would have been, what, 6?   
  
Kirk’s “romance” with Lenore is all right to watch—it’s kind of nice to see Kirk smile as if he’s genuinely enjoying the dance, and Lenore is at least as active in all this as he is—but painful to listen to. The fact that each party turns out to have been using the other might explain how Godawful their lines are. That doesn’t make it any easier to take in dialogue like, “This ship…such throbbing power…but controlled. Are you like that, Captain?” without splorting it right back out again. However, nothing is worse, from a watchability standpoint, than Lenore’s ‘mad scene’ over the body of her dead father. Her voice gets higher as she gets crazier and when she cries she sounds like she’s laughing. She is outdone in awful acting only by Leighton’s wife, whose performance of her “grief” for her husband should really have made her the prime suspect in his murder…if anyone on Planet Q was planning to investigate Leighton’s murder, which apparently they’re not.  
  
Thinking about it, though, I think the biggest problem with this episode is simply that it doesn’t really engage the show’s setting or premise. There’s absolutely no reason why this plot has to take place in the future on a starship. The fact that these characters are traveling through space doesn’t really affect the events at all. Change a few proper names and dates and all of this could just as easily be taking place on earth in 1966. Trivers by this point had a long career as a TV writer behind him, and one suspects that he just took a script idea he’d already had and transposed it to the ST:TOS universe.  
  
As for Lenore, well, she was doing all right for herself as a character until they made her an insane serial killer motivated by an abject and obsessive love for her (to her) Godlike father. Oh well. By the way, Janice Rand does actually appear in this episode, though she has no lines. She passes Lenore as she is on her way onto the bridge and gives her the evil eye. Hooray, another shining moment for Yeoman Rand.  
  
Ah well. Next up: “Balance of Terror.”


	13. BALANCE OF TERROR

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Many of the things I discuss below can be attributed to the fact that according to Robert Justman, this episode was basically a ripoff--excuse me, _homage_ \--of a specific WWII submarine movie. At any rate, this introduces the Romulans, and boy are they ever Roman. In case anyone is reading these who only know Star Trek TOS through the reboot, I should point out that in TOS Romulans and Vulcans looked basically identical. This is very important to "Balance of Terror," in which the discovery that Spock is obviously biologically similar to The Enemy makes for some contention on the bridge. 
> 
> All the way back in 2011, this guy name Randall's dubbing of a nature show clip of the [badass honey badger](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg) was a YouTube sensation, spawning the catchphrase "honey badger don't care." From this episode review on, whenever I refer to Honey Badger, I'm talking about Spock, who I think we can agree is pretty badass.

**STARDATE: August 9, 2011**

**BALANCE OF TERROR**  
 **Written by: Paul Schneider (Romulans invented by Gene L. Coon)**  
  
I'm back. Humor me and say you missed me.  
  
But first, a follow-up: Constant readers may recall that in my review for ["The Naked Time"](http://idairsauthor.livejournal.com/39113.html#cutid1) I complimented writer-producer John D. F. Black on his sensitivity:  
  
 **"Another thing I appreciate about this episode is the effort Black put into making the more stereotypical crazy plague symptoms psychological rather than racial. Sulu's fascination with swords, for instance, is something which could easily present itself as some kind of resurfacing of his warlike Japanese essence--and that's how it worked in that Twilight Zone episode Takei featured in. But by giving Sulu a specific cultural context for his "swashbuckling" fantasies--he raves about Richlieu, and is clearly acting out his own private Three Musketeers--Black makes it an expression of personality rather than biology..."**  
  
Well, at least according to George Takei, I was giving Black way too much credit. In the little featurette on the first season included on Disk 5, Takei says Black came up to him and told him he was going to write something 'different' for Sulu in “The Naked Time,” and revealed that he was going to give Sulu a Samurai sword to terrorize everyone with. Takei, perhaps remembering how much he'd liked doing the whole handling-samurai-sword-magically-makes-Japanese-American-guy-become-a-bloodthirsty-screaming-maniac thing in _Twilight Zone_ , said something along the lines of, "Well, that would certainly be ethnically accurate...but, you know, I'm Japanese-American. When I was growing up, I wasn’t playing Samurai, I was pretending to be Robin Hood." And Black said, "Oh, so you fence?" And Takei said, "Oh, sure, it's one of my hobbies." So Black went off and rewrote the script to give Sulu a rapier and a Musketeers fixation, and Takei went home and looked up fencing instructors in the Yellow Pages and got a crash course in fencing over the weekend before showing up to shoot that Monday.  
  
As I was saying to [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) , this shows you something about how social change works. Here are these white men who support diversity and make the idealistic gesture of creating a multiracial cast...but don't have too much of a clue about what it is like to be anything other than white. But, because they made the gesture, they at least have put themselves in a position where they can be educated by the people they've cast, and at least (sometimes) they are willing to listen, and so, very slowly, the clue grows.  
  
From the featurette I also learned that it was the network's call to lead with "The Man-Trap" and that Robert Justman had wanted to open with "The Naked Time." Much as [I dislike "The Man-Trap"](http://idairsauthor.livejournal.com/37827.html) I don't think you really want to roll out the crazy plague for episode #1. Justman also said that they didn't have a lot of episodes ready to go for week one, so maybe that's why they didn't make the much more sensible decision of opening with ["The Corbomite Maneuver,"](http://idairsauthor.livejournal.com/40911.html) which must have involved a lot of post-production work (those cubes don't rotate themselves, you know). And also that the scene in which Spock breaks down alone in the briefing room was Nimoy's idea, the writers having originally handled Spock’s crazy plague symptoms much more stupidly.  
  
[](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[ **lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) was surprised to see how seriously all the actors were taking "The Naked Time." Actors take everything they do seriously. And that's lucky for Roddenberry, because especially in Season One the actors must have had much better ideas about character development than any of the writers did. Anyway, on we go to Balance of Terror...  
  
 **The Summary:** Kirk is preparing to officiate at a shipboard wedding with Rand as his acolyte. (In the future, they will still be using that @#$! wedding march from Lohengrin.) He is just about to join in matrimony weapons specialists Angela Martin and Richard Tomlinson, who apparently don't have dress uniforms and therefore sadly have to get married in mustard serge, when the red alert sounds. The wedding is postponed as people fly to battle stations. We soon learn that the Enterprise is traveling toward the neutral zone established by treaty with the Romulan Empire after a war that took place over a hundred years earlier. There has never been any visual contact between humans and Romulans, so neither side knows what the other looks like (in the future, there is no videoconferencing). The federation set up a series of outposts on asteroids along the edge of the neutral zone to monitor Romulan activity, and several of these outposts have recently been attacked by a mysterious invisible adversary. Kirk informs the crew (and the audience) that this mission will be dicey because he has been told that he is under no circumstances to enter the neutral zone, as this would violate the treaty and set off an intergalactic war. In fact, the outposts and the Enterprise itself will be considered "expendable," which one assumes means that his orders are to allow both his own ship and the outposts to be destroyed rather than enter the neutral zone.  
  
They make contact with Outpost 4 just in time to see it perish in flames. They learn that a) the outposts are being destroyed by a fearsome "high energy plasma weapon" fired from a spaceship which is b) invisible most of the time except when c) the ship has to actually fire the weapon. Uhura picks up a coded transmission from the Romulan ship, and this somehow allows them to get visual access to the Romulan bridge so that we can get our first glimpse of Romulans and discover that...dun dun DUN...they look exactly like Vulcans! Pointy ears, tilty eyebrows, the works--Spock and the Romulan commander even go to the same wigmaker. Geez, that Romulan guy looks like he could be Spock's father! (rimshot) Anyway, Spock draws some baleful glances and, eventually, hateful and obnoxious behavior from helmsman Stiles, whose family were involved in the Romulan/Earth war and who from this moment forward treats Spock like a Romulan spy. Meanwhile, they discover that the Romulan ship still shows up on the sensors even though it is invisible to the human eye.  You would think this would be cause for general rejoicing. But in the future, evidently, though they will have extremely sophisticated sensor equipment, Starfleet personnel will still prefer to aim their weapons manually while squinting at the enemy through the windows. A cat-and-mouse game ensues with Kirk and the Romulan commander trying to outwit each other, each concluding that the enemy captain thinks exactly like he does, which is of course the highest compliment either can imagine conferring on anyone. During this battle, a wall-mounted box in the phaser control room starts spewing magenta-hued smoke that looks exactly like knock-out gas from the Adam West _Batman_ ; Stiles, who is down there helping Tomlinson, is overcome by the fumes and Spock has to charge in and fire the phasers himself before dragging Stiles to safety. As the Romulan vessel approaches the neutral zone, Kirk makes a huge production of informing Starfleet command that they are going into the neutral zone after all on his responsibility. This does not, apparently, happen. Kirk finally defeats the Romulan ship and then tells the Romulan commander that they’re going to beam aboard the survivors; the Romulan commander, after waxing eloquent over how much he would have loved to be Kirk’s “friend” if they had met “in another reality,” falls on his own sword, excuse me, destroys the ship and everyone on it. Down in sickbay, while Stiles apologizes to Spock for being a total dick to him, Bones reports to Kirk that the Enterprise has sustained only one fatality. Guess who it is. Did you guess “one of the crew members who was getting married in the opening scene?” Johnny, tell her what she’s won! Tomlinson, alas, succumbed to the magneta menace, leaving his fiancée to go kneel sadly in the chapel and submit to being ‘comforted’ by Kirk, who is, to quote Blackadder, about as effective in this capacity as a catflap in an elephant house. Life goes on. **END SUMMARY**

  
[](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[ **lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) was surprised to see the officers arguing with Kirk as much as they do in this episode, and asked if this was something they developed over time. I had to break it to her that in first season Star Trek there was no such thing as a ‘story arc.’ Production on this show apparently redefined “seat of the pants,” and the order in which the episodes aired was determined by when they got finished. But this episode, at least, finally introduces a metanarrative: Earth’s competition with other intergalactic empires. Did I say “other intergalactic empires?” I’m sorry. I mean, I know humans are colonizing space and everything, and I know they have this massive military presence along the neutral zone, but obviously this isn’t an empire, cause, you know, empires are evil, and America—I’m sorry, I mean “Earth,” semper hic erro—is good. I say “earth” and not “federation” because I’m not sure they’re even calling it the Federation at this point. Anyhow, at the behest of producer Gene L. Coon, Paul Schneider finally introduces the Romulans and thus lays the cornerstone for the Cold War allegory on which the show’s mythology will be constructed.    
  
I’m glad they came up with the Klingons, because “Balance of Terror” establishes some parameters that really limit the Romulans. They are too obviously—and I mean crudely, sledgehammerly, bleedin’ obviously—Romans In Space. George Lucas at least redesigned the uniforms. The Romulan commander is still wearing a frickin’ purple stripe—though sadly, William Theiss’s interpretation of the toga of the future is quilted, synthetic, and butt-ugly. There are centurions. The asshole underling with friends in high places is named Decius. There’s a Praetor. They might as well just all have SPQR tattooed on their foreheads. Who knows, maybe they do, and that’s why they all wear those stupid modified football helmets. (I’m joking of course; obviously the real reason Romulan helmets have giant metal earflaps is that it was cheaper to make ridiculous helmets than it was to make decent-looking prosthetic ears.) Spock says he thinks they’re an “offshoot of my Vulcan blood,” which I guess might make some sense since Vulcan is the Roman god of weaponry. Which of course leads us to the shocking but inescapable conclusion that after landing on the shores of Italy Aeneas then developed the capacity for space travel and took off for the outer reaches of the galaxy, where he impregnated some poor pointy-eared alien and became the progenitor of both the Vulcans and the Romulans.  Why hasn’t anyone published on this?  
  
The result is that at least in this episode the Romulans are trapped inside well-established film and TV clichés about the Romans: they’re martial, disciplined, big on organization and administration but not so much on independent thinking or creative innovation, and simultaneously ruthless (what with their gladiators and chariot races and slavery and whatnot) and noble (what with their death before dishonor and whatnot). Also, while their military geniuses are out fighting for the empire, the leadership at home has become decadent and dysfunctional and generally unworthy of their sacrifices. This is established immediately in the characterization of the Romulan commander, who is so war-weary even before the battle begins that he admits to his old friend the centurion that he finds himself “wishing for defeat,” since success will only mean the beginning of another war. Much effort is expended on making the Romulan commander sympathetic, which is done mainly by making him more identified with the enemy captain—his peer in terms of military prowess—than with the idiots above and below him in the Romulan pecking order. While I suppose it was big of Schneider to avoid totally demonizing the Other, his characterization of the Romulan commander (I keep wanting to call him Sarek) has the effect of preventing the viewers from challenging the show’s American, excuse me, Earth exceptionalism: the Romulan commander acknowledges and deplores the moral bankruptcy of his own empire, so we don’t have to get into the question of how morally bankrupt the Enterprise’s military mission might be.  
  
It’s depressing to watch this now—not only because the late Roman empire is actually a much better metaphor for contemporary America than it ever was for either the Soviet Union or Communist China, but because the idealism invested in Kirk and his crew has been so painfully falsified by recent events. When the Romulan captain refuses to let his survivors be transported to the Enterprise, both he and Kirk act as if his only motivation is fidelity to ancient Roman, excuse me, Romulan ideas of duty. Cause in the future, even Romulans know that an American, excuse me, Earth captain would never abuse, torture, or kill his prisoners of war. Whereas in the present, there is no such thing as a prisoner of war.  
  
After all the hoopla about the neutral zone, we’re all meant to get nervous when Kirk dramatically decides that he’s going to violate his “precise and inviolable” orders and go into the zone anyhow. But then he doesn’t. Note to Schneider: if your viewers have to watch the episode twice to figure out whether the Enterprise actually violates the neutral zone, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG. We see Kirk deciding to go in and we’re told they’re 20 seconds away, but the rest of the episode appears to assume that neither vessel ever actually crosses into the neutral zone. We’re finally told by poor Yeoman Rand, once again given only the most humiliating jobs (including fetching Kirk’s coffee and looking anxiously over Kirk’s shoulder at the approaching plasma weapon so that she can be protectively clutched by him during impact), that Starfleet command’s response to Kirk’s question about what to do is to take whatever action he thinks is necessary. Dude, what happened to “the Enterprise and these outposts will be considered expendable”? Either Earth is secretly spoiling for an intergalactic war and Kirk’s original orders were given in atrociously bad faith, or Schneider is so focused on showing that Kirk (like his Romulan counterpart) is way more awesome than his idiot higher-ups that he’s completely undermined the whole neutral zone thing. Given that this message is treated by all present as trivial rather than devastating, I’m going with theory #2.  
  
The treatment of the Romulan “invisibility screen” (as far as I could tell they’re not yet calling it a ‘cloaking device’) shows you how much the writers at this point were still fighting the last war. In one of the little intros produced by the SciFi channel for this episode years ago (you can find them all on YouTube now) Shatner refers to this as a “submarine battle,” and if you assume that Schneider was basically treating both ships like World War I or II-era submarines, certain things start to make more sense. Neither of us could understand why the fact that they can’t see the Romulan ship on their viewscreens was freaking everyone out so much when the sensors were picking it up without any trouble. Nowadays, as we all know, all combat is heavily mediated by technology. But of course back in the day, if you were on a plane or a boat or a battlefield you usually needed to see what you were aiming for, and the fact that in a sub you had to rely on radar and sonar and whatnot must have been milked by many a war movie for thrills, chills, and suspense. (My childhood exposure to the game “Battleship,” in which you try to blow up your opponent’s ships without being able to see them, would seem to indicate that this newfangled “radar” thing remained fascinating into the 1970s.) Schneider apparently just didn’t get the memo about the Enterprise’s sensors being so powerful and sophisticated that they can pick out one lost Venus-drug-addicted mail-order bride on the surface of a planet in the middle of an electromagnetic storm. The characters all behave as if sensor technology is still an inferior substitute for the human eye—though in fact, every single time the Enterprise fires into the void, they hit the target. By TNG, if memory serves, they had corrected this problem and made cloaked ships invisible to the sensors as well.  
  
The best thing about this episode is, once again, Spock. He’s pretty badass. He’s the [honey badger](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg) of the starship Enterprise. Racist helmsman giving him shit? Honey badger don’t care. Oh, look, the phaser control circuit’s on fire! In the future, FYI, there are no fire extinguishers, so—oh my God, what is that? He’s putting out the fire with his BARE HANDS! Think honey badger cares about some piss-ant third-degree burn? Honey badger don’t give a shit!  
  
As we know—or as I know, anyway, and anyone who has yet to be introduced to the glory that was ST:TOS will eventually learn—when Star Trek deliberately set out to Make A Statement About Race, the result was usually some sort of crude, well-intentioned yet painfully squirmworthy allegory like “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield.” But in fact, all the really interesting stuff about race is in TOS is worked out through Spock’s character. As the only part-alien on the crew, Spock has to cope with a lot of shit from a lot of people, and the way he handles it is one of the most badass things about him. My favorite moment in this whole episode is a reaction shot of Spock when they get their first look at the Romulans. Everyone is all flabbergasted and either looking at Spock or trying not to look at him; and he’s just looking at the screen with this expression that says, “Yeah, well, this should be interesting.” In a Raymond Chandler novel somewhere Marlowe talks about a bartender in a casino whose “eyes had looked on thousands of boors and millions of fools.” Spock’s got the same eyes. So, to some extent, does Sulu, who’s seen quite a few jackasses come and go in that helmsman’s chair, which appears to be the designated spot for young hotheads given to racist outbursts and general insubordination. With Takei’s anecdote about “The Naked Time” in mind, Stiles’s treatment of Spock reads like an unacknowledged reference to one of the US’s great moments in racism: the internment of Japanese-Americans during the second world war on the grounds that their genealogical connection to Japan somehow automatically made them traitors. And when Stiles is finally forced to acknowledge that Spock is a better human being than Stiles is, Spock, like the badass honey badger he is, subtly refuses to let Stiles recuperate himself: “I saved a trained navigator so that he could return to duty. I am incapable of any other feelings on the subject.” You think honey badger is impressed by your belated recognition of his worth as an individual? Honey badger don’t care!  
  
Next up: Shore Leave. Hooo boy.


	14. SHORE LEAVE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yeoman Janice Rand is now history. For the rest of Season One they will bring in a whole parade of Hot Yeomen to take over the parts that would have been (or had originally been) written for Rand's character. 
> 
> "Shore Leave" is, rather surprisingly, from the same writer who later brought us "Amok Time," my favorite episode of all time. This is not my favorite episode of all time, but it is a classic. This is the first episode broadcast to feature the infamous Vasquez Rocks, a striking rock formation at a park somewhere near Los Angeles which will reappear on many different alien planets to come. The Vasquez Rocks are so iconic, and TOS's overuse of them so blatant, that they are incorporated into an elaborately prepared visual joke in the obscure 1980s film _Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey_.

**STARDATE: August 9, 2011**

**SHORE LEAVE**  
 **Written by: Theodore Sturgeon**  
  
I had this title attached in my mind to a totally different episode. I popped it into the player expecting to be transported to the cobbled streets of an alien city enough like nineteenth century London to create some Jack the Ripper vibes…and instead I saw McCoy and Sulu strolling along by the shore of a lake talking about how beautiful it was. And in my head, I shouted, “NoooOOOOOooooo!!!!”  
  
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s “Shore Leave,” a ‘classic’ episode which could best be described as what would happen if “The Cage” was remade by Walt Disney for a young adult audience.  
  
 **The Summary:** After a rough three months, everyone on the Enterprise is in dire need of R &R—including Kirk, who has a crick in his back which requires the ministrations of Yeoman Burrows, a lissome redhead (wearing, for once, her own hair) who has evidently taken over Rand’s old job. They discover an earthlike planet to which McCoy and Sulu beam down. Sensors indicate that the planet contains no animal life of any kind—not even insects. One would imagine would make a botanist like Sulu spend the entire episode shouting, “But that’s biologically impossible! This kind of plant life can neither evolve nor survive without animal life! Without bees! Without earthworms! Without birds to eat their fruits and crap the seeds out on the other side of the lake! It’s a trap! It’s a trap I’m telling you! You’ve got to believe me!” But instead, Sulu and McCoy just talk about beautiful this planet is, and McCoy says it’s like something out of Alice in Wonderland, and then all of a sudden there’s a guy in a full-body white rabbit suit looking at his watch and stressing about how he’s going to be late. As a stunned McCoy looks on, the departing rabbit is followed by a tween in an Alice in Wonderland costume, who asks if he’s seen a large white rabbit lately; McCoy motions in the rabbit’s direction, and she rushes off. McCoy determines that Sulu didn’t see either creature; when he calls to report this visitation to Kirk, Kirk assumes (not unreasonably) that McCoy is pulling his leg. Spock, who’s too badass to need R&R (honey badger don’t frolic, he’s too busy eating cobras raw) convinces Kirk to go down and get some. Kirk brings Yeoman Burrows along—presumably in case his back seizes up again—and they materialize right near crew members Esteban Rodriguez and Angela Martin, who judging by her intimacy with Rodriguez seems to have recovered nicely from her tragic bereavement in last week’s episode. Kirk discovers a set of very large rabbit tracks near where McCoy had his intertextual hallucination. They decide to hold off on bringing the rest of the crew down while they investigate this giant rabbit. And we’re off.  
  
What is clearly happening, though it takes them an amazingly long time to realize it, is that whatever they think of materializes a few moments later. Probably this has something to do with the big metal antennae that occasionally pop up behind rocks and trees as they pass by. Kirk is alternately taunted by a bully named Finnegan who used to torment him at Starfleet Academy, and turned into a tranquilized love-bot by his miraculously still-young old flame Ruth. Rodriguez is persecuted by both a tiger and a World War II era bomber, which kills Angela during one of its strafing runs. Sulu, at first delighted to discover an old style police revolver to add to his extensive collection of antique weapons, is eventually attacked by a samurai warrior, whose sudden appearance from a hole in the ground produced an earsplitting howl from yours truly. COME ON! Samurai? At least give us a new stereotype, just for variety. Bring in a giant origami crane, or something.   
  
(In my head, the gun is the result of a tense conversation between Takei and Black behind the scenes. “Here’s your samurai sword, George.” “Get away from me with that fucking samurai sword, John.” “OK, here’s a gun we picked up from the cop show next door.” “Fine.” “By the way, George, in your next scene…oh, never mind.” But I digress.)   
  
Meanwhile, Yeoman Burrows is first menaced by Don Juan, then magically gifted with a ‘medieval’ princess outfit which McCoy, whose smooth Southern charm is apparently turning Burrows’s brain into butter, convinces her to put on cause he wants to see her in it. Meanwhile, Spock, having discovered that some power source deep beneath the planet’s surface is draining the Enterprise’s power and interfering with communication, manages to beam down before the transporters go kaput. So at least we have one rational adult chaperoning when, at the rendezvous called for by Kirk right before the communicators go out, a knight in armor on a black stallion runs McCoy through with a lance.   
  
McCoy dies, unfortunately without gasping out “I’m dead, Jim.” Kirk shoots the knight with the police special (the phasers aren’t working any more) and discovers that it’s an android, though nobody calls it that. While they’re distracted, McCoy’s corpse and the dead android are whisked away by unseen forces, and the hunt is on for the source of all this insanity. Finnegan shows up again, which leads to an extended chase/fight scene during which Kirk loses almost his entire tunic, making the Kirk’s Denuded Torso Index the only leading indicator to go up this week. Though it takes for fucking EVER, Kirk does finally deck Finnegan. Spock walks up and asks whether Kirk enjoyed it; Kirk finally figures out what’s going on. Burrows, meanwhile, is changing outfits again when Don Juan springs upon her; Sulu is trying to figure out how to fend him off when Spock, Kirk, and Rodriguez reappear (Angela’s dead, of course, though nobody ever mentions this) and Don Juan flees. Kirk orders them all to stand to attention and not think. At this point, the Keeper—I’m sorry, the Caretaker—shows up and explains that this planet was created by his super-advanced people as a gigantic amusement park and that this is all supposed to be fun. Kirk points out that it’s only fun until your ship’s surgeon gets killed (Angela’s been killed too, of course, but nobody brings this up). McCoy then shows up hale and hearty with a bikini-clad bimbo on each arm, explaining that he was taken below the surface for “repairs.” (Perhaps what really happens is that he’s replaced by an android. That would make more sense, since he is ‘dead’ for long enough to have sustained serious brain damage.) Angela’s still MIA, but nobody cares; Burrows is focused on shooing the two showgirls away from McCoy and Kirk, Spock, and Sulu are having an important conversation with the Caretaker about the need for play. The caretaker offers to put the planet at the crew’s disposal, “with the proper safety precautions.” Kirk tells Uhura to start sending shore leave parties down to the planet. Spock pleads to be allowed to return to the bridge, noting that “with all due respect to the young lady” (this would be the showgirl cozying up to him) “I’ve already had as much shore leave as I care for.” Kirk is about to argue, but then Ruth shows up in the distance, and he decides he’s going to stay awhile, even though he now knows she’s an android, which I guess answers the question posed by “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” about whether it matters that the hot woman who’s really into you is real or not. Angela finally shows up in the very last shot of the landing party; nobody comments upon this. So then everyone’s back on the bridge, and everyone tells Spock how much they loved their shore leave, and Spock says that’s very illogical, and everyone has a good laugh at Spock’s expense, and ahead warp factor one we go. **END SUMMARY**

  
The one thing I kept thinking, when I wasn’t cursing the samurai out, is how pissed off Grace Lee Whitney must have been that they fired her before “Shore Leave.” Because even though she would still have had to almost get raped—twice—she would at least have had some fun. Burrows seems to enjoy her flirtation with McCoy, whose old-fashioned chivalry is presumably the source for the medieval fantasy the planet concocts for them; and although the hot yeoman character remains eminently pukeworthy from a feminist standpoint (apparently administering backrubs is part of her job description; she loves being protected by men; she is utterly incapable of protecting herself; her first fantasy conjures up literature’s most notorious rapist; she responds to McCoy’s death with hysterical sobbing until Kirk snaps her out of it), Hot Yeoman 2.0 doesn’t seem as pathetic or tragic as the original model. Partly, no doubt, that’s because Sturgeon gives her a love interest who actually likes her instead of continuing Rand’s self-destructive obsession with Kirk. I am struck as I write this by how hard it is to ever imagine Rand actually enjoying herself. I wonder whether that’s because of how Rand was written, how Whitney was directed, or what Whitney was going through in real life.   
  
So Yeoman 2.0 is downgraded to a minor annoyance rather than a giant black hole of misogyny that warps the space-time continuum wherever it appears. The treatment of Ruth is interesting in that she does not look or act like most of the women Kirk has had flung at him so far. Her costume is more neoclassical than sexbot and the focus is on her face rather than her curves. Kirk seems genuinely moved by her, though one could wish this had not deteriorated into a kind of lobotomized trance. But we don’t, of course, find out anything about her; Sturgeon and Kirk are a lot more interested in Finnegan, a howling, belligerent, simian creature with an Irish accent and an annoying habit of saying “me boy.” Once again, Kirk is taunted by an anarchic Irish doppelganger who has to be beaten into submission before anything else can move forward. (For those keeping track: there is of course Riley in “Naked Time,” and when Mudd first shows up in “Mudd’s Women” he is putting on an Irish accent.)   
  
As for the premise, well, we’ve seen versions of the “your desires and fears become reality” plot before (“The Man-Trap,” “The Cage/The Menagerie”). The immediate source for this plot is probably  _Forbidden Planet,_  in which the monster terrorizing the crew turns out to be a material manifestation of everyone’s collective id. This is the first time it’s been played for comedy, though. Some of the things called into being are dangerous, but none of them are especially dark—unless you take the whole Don Juan thing more seriously than Sturgeon evidently took it. In the Don Juan legend there is no distinction made between seduction and rape. “Nothing that happens here is permanent,” says the Caretaker. Really? What about rape? Supposing Burrows did get raped by your android Don Juan, could you all go back and make that _not_ have happened? Or is being raped by Don Juan supposed to be one of those things like having a 15-minute donnybrook with a deranged leprechaun—you know, it feels like crap until it’s over, at which point you realize you enjoyed it? Maybe so, given that he’s called into being by her thinking that in such a romantic setting, “all a girl needs is Don Juan.”  
  
Failures of logic and continuity abound. The planet’s machinery is extremely selective in what it chooses to create (it’s a good thing McCoy was reading Lewis Carroll as a kid and not, say, H. P. Lovecraft). In closeups of the crew investigating the downed knight there is some kind of department store mannequin head inside the helmet; in the long shots, the helmet is clearly empty. Everyone else completely forgets about Angela after her ‘death’ and my guess is that she is shoved into that final shot of the landing party only because some low-level production assistant pointed this problem out to McEveety on the final day of shooting.   
  
On the plus side, we discover that at least a few things later than Shakespeare survived from the human literary canon: _Alice in Wonderland_ evidently Stood the Test of Time and—I dunno, it could be either Mozart, Moliere, Byron, or what the hell, maybe even _Don Juan DeMarco_. And it is nice to have an episode that takes place in an actual outdoor environment instead of a molded Styrofoam set. There’s a shot of Kirk et al. racing across the sward toward the sound of danger which makes you realize how cramped everything has been up to this point; since all the external scenes are meant to be taking place on alien planets they hardly ever get off the sound stage. The rock formations on which the fight with Finnegan is staged look uncannily familiar; I imagine I will see them in future episodes, since it would be totally in keeping with how this show got made for them to have shot all the exterior scenes from Season One on the same visit to some public park to which admission is free.


	15. THE GALILEO SEVEN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All right, so, this one got long, because it's our first real "Vulcan logic vs. human emotion" plot and I had some Things To Say about the false logic/emotion dichotomy and where ethics fits into it and oh what the hell I'll just go paste it in.
> 
> This review introduces the acronym (made up by myself) MOMIS, which stands for "Moment Of Most Intense Sucking," and is used to refer to a really horrible thing embedded in an otherwise pretty good episode and not whatever you people with your gutter minds are thinking right now.

**STARDATE: August 18, 2011**

**THE GALILEO SEVEN**  
 **Written by: Oliver Crawford and S. Bar-David from a teleplay by Oliver Crawford**  
  
Possible alternative titles: "In Which A Bunch of Jerks Are Really Mean to my Beloved Honey Badger," or perhaps, "When Kirk's Away...The Episode Gets Better."  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise is carrying a load of crucial medical supplies to a plague-stricken colony on Machus 3. They are also carrying a Galactic Commissioner whose name is something like Ferrows but who I will refer to as Commissioner SUTA, which stands for Stick Up The Ass, and whcih tells you everything you really need to know about this character. Commissioner SUTA wants the Enterprise to go straight to Machus 3. However, since whoever's actually distributing the stuff isn't planning to show up for another 5 days, and it only takes 3 to get to Machus 3, Kirk has decided to take a couple days and check out a quasar, since he has "standing orders to investgiate all quasars and quasar-like phenomena." Like an idiot, Kirk decides that the way to investigate this quasar is to stick half his senior officers in a shuttlecraft and have them fly right into it. So Spock, McCoy, Scott, and four low-ranking crewmembers (three male hotheads and this week's hot female yeoman) pile into the shuttlecraft Galileo and go check it out. Naturally the 'ionization' created by the quasar overwhelms the shuttlecraft's navigational equipment almost immediately. It loses contact with the Enterprise and is sucked into the quasar, which rather improbably happens to contain at its very heart a planet able to support life, upon which they are most fortunately wrecked. Spock, as the ranking officer, then has to figure out how to get the shuttlecraft back into orbit around the planet before the Enterprise takes off for Mackus 3. Unbeknownst to them, the Enterprise has also been affected by the quasar's ion storm: communication is out, none of their sensors work, the transporters aren't safe to use, and basically they're stuck trying to find the shuttlecraft by visual inspection of a gigantic region of space. And since this episode is not written by Paul Schneider, everyone on board recognizes that the senors would be way more useful in this situation than their eyeballs, and that without them, as Kirk dramatically says just before the commercial break, "finding a needle in a haystack would be child's play" compared to what they're trying to do.  
  
So we have two parallel plots here. There's the search plot, which is pretty simple: Commissioner SUTA tries to get Kirk to give up, Kirk vows to continue, the instruments gradually come back on line so they can start sending down search parties but they still can't get a lock on the shuttlecraft. Then we have the plot down on the planet, where Spock is coping with both an increasingly desperate situation and the growing hostility of the crew.   
  
First there's the fact that with the available fuel, Scott estimates they'll have to dump 500 pounds to achieve orbit. Spock observes that this works out to the weight of 3 grown men, and thus begins a debate about who will get left behind. While still fuming over that, two of the male hotheads who are out on security duty are attacked by by a gigantic MOMIS. MOMIS stands for Moment of Most Intense Sucking, and is a term applied (by me, anyway) to a howlingly bad element embedded in an otherwise decent episode. I introduce the term now because I'm sure I'll be using it again. In this case, the MOMIS is a race of furry bipeds similar in form and in cultural development to neolithic humans but about 15 feet tall. Hothead #1 gets a spear through the back. Now we get to have a debate about how to respond to this threat, in which Spock's respect for other life forms arouses the anger of all present. After Spock further antagonizes Boma (Hothead #3) et al. by refusing to stop work on repairing the fuel lines to go officiate at the burial of Hothead #1 (on the grounds that it is illogical to do so while racing against time), the fuel line busts anyway and all the fuel drains away. This looks like an impossible situation until Scotty figures out that he can jerry-rig the reactors to function on the fuel contained in the phasers. While the rest of the crew agonizes about whether it's a good idea to render their only weapons unusable, Hothead #2, who has been left alone to stand guard, is overcome by a gigantic MOMIS waving its furry arms menacingly about. Spock recovers Hothead #2's body, at some risk to himself. Does he get any props for this? No, because the MOMISes start attacking the shuttle, which makes everyone yell at Spock for not having killed a couple like the hotheads wanted him to. Spock and Scotty finally figure out they can use the ship's batteries (in the future, shuttlecraft will still be using batteries the same way our earth 'cars' do now) to electrify the shuttle exterior. This backs the MOMISes off for a while, but also means they won't be able to hold orbit very long. Boma now insists on burying Hothead #2. Spock, having learned the error of his ways, goes out with Boma and McCoy to bury Hothead #2 and is rewarded by being pinned to the ground by a giant rock tossed as part of the inevitable MOMIS attack. While Spock is yelling at the other two to leave him behind, Boma and McCoy naturally take the time to pry the rock loose and help Spock into the shuttlecraft. Then they can't take off because the MOMISes are holding them down, so they have to use yet another power source to get them moving. Now they're in orbit, hooray. But they only have enough power to hold it for 45 minutes. Hurroo. Spock stares at the control panel for a while, and then suddenly jettisons and ignites the fuel. Everyone thinks he's nuts until Scotty figures out that this will create a trail of fire which will be visible to anyone looking at the planet. So, by the time the orbit starts decaying and the shuttlecraft starts smoking and the Yeowoman Du Jour says "It's getting hot," everyone is at least feeling pleased that Spock has finally done something "human."  
  
Meanwhile, on board the Enterprise, Kirk's time is up. Under pressure from Commissioner SUTA he reluctantly orders the crew to abandon the search and set course for Machus 3...at 'space normal speed.' Thus, they are still in the vicinity when Spock sets off his flare, which Sulu fortunately catches a glimpse of. Transporters are now working, so they lock on to the five survivors and beam them aboard just before the shuttlecraft burns up in the atmosphere. Uhura reports they are all aboard and alive and well. Kirk finally sits back in his captain chair and relaxes.  
  
Cut to the bridge, where as soon as Spock shows up Kirk starts interrogating him about whether his decision to ignite the fuel was irrational. As the entire crew looks on like they're watching television--or really, more like they're watching a bully taunt a nerd--Spock maintains it was the only rational thing to do under the circumstances. Kirk finally says, "You're a stubborn man, Mr. Spock," to which Spock replies, "Yes, sir." This sets the entire bridge crew off on a laughing jag which, because it has to cover the beginning of the credits, goes on until it becomes rather grotesquely forced. **END SUMMARY**

  
Let me say up front that this is a pretty good episode. It's character-driven but still engaged with the premise, the writing is above the usual standard, and best of all, Kirk is bundled out of the way so the other characters can do stuff. With the Enterprise essentially disabled for most of the episode, there's not a hell of a lot for Kirk to do other than lock horns with Commissioner SUTA. Meanwhile, with Spock stranded on the planet, dialogue that would normally be given to him has to go to someone else, which means that Uhura finally gets to talk science for a change. Scott also does a lot more talking in this episode than he ever has before, and Sulu gets to do some nice reactions. And what Kirk has to do, Shatner does pretty well. I would also like to give the producers props for pushing for diversity in casting even when it comes to the extras. Boma is not that great a part, but it's probably better than a lot of the crap Don Marshall seems to have been asked to do during his television career.  
  
As for Hot Yeoman 3.0, she is so outrageously useless and so purely ornamental that one can only breathe a sigh of relief over the fact that her femininity was not dragged into the Dilemmas in some horrendous way. (Being of slight build she is not a candidate for being left behind, even though she's clearly the least useful member of the party. Sadly, as a female, she also seems to be exempt from sentry duty.)   
  
By this point in the series, one imagines that some of the viewers were asking themselves the question, "Hey, since Spock is so badass, shouldn't he be the captain?" "The Galileo Seven" is framed from the get-go as an answer to this question. McCoy points out very early that this is Spock's "first command," and insinuates that Spock must be pleased about this, since he's "always thought command should be based on logic." Whereas, of course, we know from "The Enemy Within" that command requires decisiveness which is inseparable from the desire to rape...but I digress. Anyhow, Spock says he doesn't have any feelings about being in command one way or the other; but in this episode at least, he clearly does. As the MOMISes are banging on the shuttlecraft for the first time, Spock has a little monologue in which he expresses his bafflement over the fact that though he has always made the logical decision, it never seems to achieve a positive result; and when he mentions that he has evoked everyone's hostility, he really does seem to be hurt by that (in that Spock way where he doesn't really show it but he sort of allows you to imagine that he's showing it). (He is also sad that "two men have died." Oh, honey badger. The only reason two men have died is that you followed the idiotic but apparently standard Starfleet protocol according to which at least one guy needs to be left alone in an isolated area so some monster can kill him without revealing itself to the others. Kirk would have done the same, trust me.) This moment is treated by the writers as the turning point after which things finally start going Spock's way. He successfully repels the MOMISes, agrees to help with the burial, manages to get the shuttle into orbit, and of course commits the final act of "human" desperation which is the only reason they get rescued.  
  
So in the story this episode is trying to tell, Spock has to learn his lesson and start behaving more like a human in order to make a success of his first command. It is my curse that whenever I can figure out the story someone is trying to tell me, I go looking for other stories they're not trying to tell.  
  
First of all, in my worldview, the idea that logic and emotion are always opposed or even that they can be separated in any kind of a stable way is one of the biggest crocks of shit ever sold to us by the patriarchy. Look at capitalism. Everyone acts like there's nothing more rational than economics; but capitalism is clearly driven by human emotions and at times--such as these, for instance--it just goes plumb batshit crazy. And yet this episode is structured by a series of "dilemmas" based on this false opposition, in which Spock is put in the position of having to make the "logical" choice instead of the one which would be dictated by emotion.   
  
As the episode unrolls, though, it becomes clear that logic is never pure. In Dilemma #1 (Who do we leave behind?) Spock incurs everyone's anger by being coldly utilitarian: he appears not to perceive any significant difference between 500 pounds of equipment and 500 pounds of humanity. In Dilemma #2 (How should we respond to the MOMISes' attack?), Spock actually does show some emotion--but it's on behalf of the MOMISes instead of his human crewmates. In this dilemma, Spock actually marks the fact that he's *not* making the "logical" decision, but rather an ethical one: he admits that Boma's idea of killing a couple MOMISes "seemed logical to me too," but takes a different course because he's trying to balance his respect for MOMIS life with the needs of his crew. This decision is, interestingly enough, presented as both antidemocratic--"I'm not interested in the majority," Spock snaps--and more obviously and fundamentally wrong than any of his others. Even McCoy, who most of the time is at least not openly trying to undermine Spock (unlike Boma and the other hotheads) is very angry about that decision, and while the MOMISes are banging on the shuttlecraft is given the chance to school Spock in the evils of applying universal ethical standards to inferior beings: "Did it ever occur to you that they might not react rationally?" Well, yes, as a matter of fact, Spock's whole plan is based on the idea that they will be irrationally afraid of the phaser fire even though it doesn't hurt them and the humans are greatly outnumbered, and besides there's no real reason to believe that killing them would have produced a different reaction...but does honey badger say that? No, honey badger goes off into his soul-searching monologue about how logic doesn't work. So much for ethics.  
  
In Dilemma #3 (Should Spock help Scott with the repairs or go officiate at Hothead #1's burial?), Spock's decision is not logical at all. It takes him longer to argue with Boma than it would to go "say a few words" over Hothead #1's corpse. The much more obvious explanation is that Spock is simply desperately uncomfortable with a situation that requires him to produce 'human' emotions for the benefit of others. He's never done anything like this, he's got no idea what they want him to say, and he's pretty sure that however he tries to console them he's gonna do it wrong, so instead he tries to send McCoy out. The fact that McCoy would undoubtedly do a better job officiating at a burial, just as Spock is undoubtedly doing a better job fixing that circuit than McCoy would, is obvious but not apparently appreciated. Spock is acting out of emotion; but since they're not emotions that any of them can recognize or accept, they assume he's being 'logical', and they hate him for it.  
  
When Dilemma #3 recurs again with Hothead #2's body, however, everything gets more ambivalent. Spock points out that given that the MOMISes will be back soon and they're about to lift off, it really is a little unreasonable for Boma to be insisting on a funeral, and McCoy and Scott are visibly dismayed by Boma's insulting response. Nevertheless, the newly humble Spock has to agree to go, and he has to submit to being saved by noble human compassion, and when he points out quite correctly that by saving him they've materially damaged their chances of escape (graciously not pointing out that if Boma hadn't chosen that moment to go all Antigone on everyone's ass, the MOMISes wouldn't have had time to throw that rock in the first place) all McCoy can do is tell Spock to "remind me to tell you that I'm sick of your logic."   
  
So now we come to the Human Act of Desperation: jettisoning and igniting the fuel. And it is at this moment that the whole logic/emotion dichotomy implodes, though of course none of the other characters will ever admit this.  
  
The one 'logical' principle that none of the human characters ever abandon is that they should do whatever will extend their lives for the longest possible time. Though they are willing to take risks for 'illogical' reasons (such as delaying liftoff in order to bury their dead) they react to Spock's last decision as if it's insane--because it shortens the amount of time they can hold their orbit and thereby hastens their deaths. But seriously. The choice is: You are guaranteed 45 minutes of life, after which you will surely die; or you do something which has a very slight chance of ensuring your future survival, but a much greater chance of killing you in 6 minutes. Does it not make more sense to take the chance instead of waiting another 39 minutes for the inevitable end? Certainly it does...unless you are irrationally attached to the idea that every minute of your existence is so intrinsically precious that it never makes sense to risk even 39 minutes of your life for the hope of a greater gain.  
  
Spock seems to have a different attitude toward death. When Hot Yeoman 3.0 whines, "I don't want to die here," Spock replies that burning up in the shuttlecraft is a lot better than dying on the planet surface would be. Boma says that he admires Spock's ability to 'make so measured a choice,' and though he sounds pissed off we could perhaps see this as Boma grudgingly acknowledging that there is something to this 'logic' bullshit after all. But it's not just about choosing how to die; it's about taking quality rather than quantity of life into account. After all, where are their "emotions" going to lead these people if they are marooned on that planet? Odds are good that if they do manage to stave off the MOMISes they'll just wind up killing each other over drinking water, and probably resorting to cannibalism before it's all over. You want to stay down there and live out all that ugliness, or do you want to risk your life on the slim chance of being able to return to a better existence?  
  
So there is a logic--and to me, a persuasive logic--behind Spock's decision. But it's founded on the subjective belief that sometimes it's better to risk death than to preserve life at all costs; and this is my point. "Logic" as Star Trek usually depicts it is ultimately founded on core beliefs which are not objective. Even the primacy of self-interest, which is what most of this 'logic' is usually founded on, is not an objective and unarguable given. But I guess the writers didn't want to go there. Even when Spock's defending the 'logic' of his decision in that final scene, though, he doesn't really articulate that argument; and the way Nimoy plays it, Spock does actually seem to be motivated by emotion. He makes this decision on the spur of the moment, after musing on McCoy's crack, "So ends your first command." After he's done it, he's visibly upset, and the more people congratulate him for it the more gloomy he looks. He seems genuinely upset with himself for having done something so impulsive, possibly because the 'logical' part of him is convinced that there's "nobody to see it."  
  
But of course Spock hasn't reckoned on the well-known irrationality of his buddy Captain Kirk, who of course would NEVER abandon his friends on an alien planet just because there's no way to save them...unless someone higher up in the chain of command tells him to do it.   
  
And this is why I get so impatient with the way people treat Spock. Kirk is following his own logic up there. He will nobly and loyally do his all to recover his crew members--*until* it requires him to risk his rank, his freedom, and hsi control of the Enterprise by openly defying someone with authority over him. And since Kirk actually proves himself, in other episodes, willing to do some of those things when the conditions are right, we can only assume that underneath it all Kirk is susceptible to Commissioner SUTA's own logic--which once again comes back to the greatest good for the greater number. But since Kirk performs his emotions about all this so much more obviously, we sympathize more with him--even though he comes very close to making a decision more chilling than the one Spock is faced with in Dilemma #1, and leaving ALL the castaways behind in order to get the medical supplies to Machus 3.  
  
The thing that really made me want to smack the hotheads was how obvious it was (to me anyway) that their hostility is responding not to the fact that Spock is 'logical,' but simply to the fact that he is different from them and doesn't react the way they would. And it would seem that one thing that separates the officers from the goats, as it were, is the ability to (grudgingly) accept the worth of people who are different from you. One of the neat things about this episode is seeing Scott and Spock work together. Initially Scott is just as irritated with Spock as everyone else. When the fuel runs out, he replies to Spock's "Consider the alternatives" with "What alternatives? We've no fuel!" But he thinks about it, and by God he comes up with an alternative. Scott is sympathetic to Spock's desire to shut up and get the fucking work done, and he has the same ability to look at a depressing situation without getting overwrought about it. By the end of the episode, when Scott is the first to figure out what Spock's really doing, you can sort of see the beginning of a beautiful friendship; and though of course this can't have been intentional, it suggests that Scott's can-do "aye, cap'n, I'll get ye more power even though we're already at maximum, cause there's always alternatives, och aye" spirit might actually be a gift from his badass honey badger sensei.


	16. THE SQUIRE OF GOTHOS

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More omnipotent children! But this time there's camp.

**STARDATE: August 27, 2011**

**THE SQUIRE OF GOTHOS**  
 **Written by: Paul Schneider**  
  
From the man who brought you "Balance of Terror" comes "Charlie Q," or, "Cat's Paw Without The Scary Devouring Feminine," or "Before There Was Jack Sparrow, There Was Trelayne."   
  
I'll say one thing for this one: it's memorable. A lot more of this one was familiar to me even across the aeons than with some of the others.   
  
**The Summary:** The Enterprise, which appears to be not so much a space exploration vessel as a courier service, is once again carrying a load of desperately needed medical supplies to a distant colony and to get there has to cross a "star desert"--a void of empty space which for McCoy and Kirk conjures up memories of sun, sand, oases, and palm trees, giving Spock the opportunity to be a pill and tell everyone what the literal definition of "desert" is. (In the future, by the way, we will still be drinking hot beverages from disposable plastic cups.) As they make haste to cross this star desert they hear Omar Sharif's voice calling out from the darkness, "THE NEFUD CANNOT BE CROSSED!"   
  
No...no, that's not what happens. Sorry. I'll start again.  
  
As they make haste to cross this star desert, they discover there's a planet in the middle of it. To be precise, a nasty-looking little greenish planet full of volcanic storms and unbreathable air, which is indicated by some digitally added effects which are meant, I suppose, to simulate volcanic eruptions but which look like camera flashbulbs going off. While duly intrigued by the fact that this planet exists even though all their records show this sector as empty, Kirk is not planning to investigate...until Sulu suddenly disappears. Kirk runs over, perhaps to palpate the air and figure out if maybe he's just turned invisible...and then _he_ disappears. Spock, who is not fool enough to run to the same spot and get sucked in after them, yells, "Run away! Run away!"  
  
OK, he doesn't yell that. But they do reverse engines.   
  
After a four-hour search of the ship and sensor sweep of the planet, there's no trace of Kirk or Sulu. In response to "let's go down there and find 'em" backchat from Scotty and McCoy, Spock requests Lieutenant Jaeger, a meteorologist who for some reason is sitting on the bridge, to describe the planet's (totally poisonous and unsuitable for human life) atmosphere. Having elicited the admission that the "estimated survival time for two unprotected human individuals on the planet surface" is "not very long," Spock is considering his options when, on the viewing screen above Uhura's station, the words "Greetings and Felicitations! Tallyho!" appear. (In the future, immature young adults will still have a fondness for Zapf Chancery.) Admitting that, as Scotty points out, this at least indicates there's life on the planet, Spock sends down a landing party consisting of Jaeger, Desalle (this week's hothead navigator dude), and McCoy ("neither you nor I can be spared here," says Spock to Scott; but I guess McCoy is perennially spareable).   
  
They materialize in a pleasant wood (all right, amongst a stand of artificial trees backlit by a green cyclorama) full of breathable air, and shortly discover a rugged stone castle furnished like Gaston's hunting lodge in _Beauty and the Beast_. Sneaking in, they pass a gallery of hunting trophies which contains the salt sucking creature from "Man-Trap"...and Kirk and Sulu, motionless and lit up in green. A frock-coated, puffy-shirted, impish little man suddenly appears at the harpsichord in the corner, playing frenetically as he talks. He 'releases' Kirk and Sulu, introduces himself as General Trelayne, Retired ("you may address me as the squire of Gothos") and explains that humans are his favorite predator species and he's so pumped they could drop by and they are his special guests and do partake of the banquet I expressly ordered for you and so on and so forth.  
  
Turns out Trelayne has been observing earth, but since he's 900 light years away, he thinks that on Earth it's still...well, the script is a little cagey when it comes to precise dates but the intention seems to have been the Napoleonic era (late 18th-early 19th century). Bones discovers that Trelayne doesn't read as human--or as anything at all--on the tricorder. While Kirk et al. get irked by Trelayne's snide remarks about their wars of conquest and their violent behavior, Spock and Scotty boost power to the sensors and are able to detect the small habitable area Trelayne has created. Spock decides to just beam up everything living in that area. Scott, strangely, tries to talk Spock out of this crazy "shooting in the dark", but honey badger don't care; and they manage to beam the whole bundle of them right out of Trelayne's banquet hall...causing Trelayne to pitch the first of many snit fits.  
  
With much relief everyone is on the bridge preparing to, as Kirk puts it, "put a million miles between ourselves and that madman," until the madman himself appears on the bridge, frock coat and all. Trelayne then transports the entire bridge crew back to his hunting lodge. This means Spock, Kirk, Bones, Sulu, Jaeger, Dasalle, Uhura and, unfortunately, Hot Yeoman 4.0, who happens to have wandered by a few minutes earlier to tell Kirk that she was worried about him. Trelayne smarms up the women, referring to Uhura as a "Nubian princess" who was "Taken on one of your raids of conquest, no doubt," and spouts Christopher Marlowe at Hot Yeoman 4.0 ("Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?"). Since Trelayne is working on a 900 year time lag we cannot say for certain that Marlowe's _Faust_ has Stood the Test of Time, though the priceless reaction shot of Spock at this moment suggests Marlowe might still be read on Vulcan. He magically enables/compels Uhura to play the harpsichord while he magically slaps an empire-waist ballgown and headdress on Hot Yeoman 4.0 and dances with her. This gives the men a chance to put their heads together and figure out that the large mirror in the corner is probably Trelayne's power source and that it's probably not the one responsible for maintaining the breathable atmosphere. This gives Kirk the idea of pretending to be jealous of Hot Yeoman 4.0, challenging Trelayne to a duel, and then shooting out the mirror. This does in fact cause the illusion to break down and enable the Enterprise to beam them all back, to the deafening strains of Snit #2.  
  
But no sooner are they back and trying to get the hell out of range when _the planet itself_ starts chasing the ship and trying to smash it. An exasperated Kirk decides to beam down and take Trelayne on solo. Down he goes. Trelayne is now dressed like a judge and after attempting to put Kirk on trial decides to sentence him to be hanged. Kirk tells Trelayne he's really missing an opportunity to have some fun here, and talks him into doing a hunt instead of a hanging. So Kirk will go hide in the woods, and Trelayne will hunt him, and while this is going on, Trelayne will release the Enterprise. After a very disappointing 'hunt' in which Trelayne can't even manage to denude Kirk's torso for crying out loud, Trelayne has him magically boxed in and is about to deliver the coup de grace to a defiant and pissed-off Kirk when all of a sudden two glowing green lights show up to tell Trelayne to knock it off. Yes, it's Trelayne's mom and dad (in the future, even incorporeal energy beings will still have one parent of each gender) come to get him to stop torturing his pets and come in for dinner. While standing in a spotlight which is in no way diegetically explained, Trelayne pitches a truly unnecessarily long snit fit about how he was winning and it's no fair and he never gets to have any fun. Trelayne disappears, the parents apologize to Kirk, and soon we're back on the bridge. Spock is concerned about how to classify Trelayne in his report. Kirk suggests describing him as a small, naughty boy, then reminisces about all the pranks Spock no doubt pulled as a small boy, only realizing when the eyebrow goes up that honey badger was too busy learning how to kill cobra to be dipping girls' hair in inkwells and tying tin cans to the tails of cats. And off they go at warp factor something. **END SUMMARY**

  
Omnipotent children _again?_  
  
Years ago I gave myself a little mini-seminar on _The Twilight Zone_. You would be amazed how many TZ episodes involve adult characters who realize after an episodeful of mounting tension and paranoia that they are actually the toys of some gigantic child. We are only 16 episodes into _Star Trek_ at this point and this is the third episode in which Kirk has had to match wits with some sort of mutant child (the other two being "Charlie X" and "Miri"). Having been just about exhausted by my own little omnipotent being today, I'm not going to pause to theorize that, except to observe that at least in "Squire of Gothos," the fact that the mutant child presents as an adult and can therefore be played by an adult makes it more interesting. In one of the featurettes the actor who played Trelayne talked with great enthusiasm about how much he loved the part; and Trelayne's amoral, capricious, infuriating glee is the most entertaining thing about this episode. It is also somewhat entertaining to watch Kirk descend to his level, especially when he's baiting Trelayne into putting the "fun" back into murder.   
  
As [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) pointed out, however, Kirk does a crappy job of standing up for his female crewmembers. He lets Trelayne's "taken on one of your raids of conquest" remark pass, allows him to manipulate Uhura and harass Hot Yeoman 4.0 (if you're keeping track, this one's name is Teresa Ross) as long as it's strategically useful, and then embarrasses and frightens HY4 by barging in all of a sudden like a bull defending its heifer. Back on the bridge after their second escape, though, Hot Yeoman 4.0 is all smiles and perkiness as she asks permission to go change her dress (one might also note that out of 16 episodes so far this is the second one that goes to great lengths to get the hot yeoman into a fantasy ball gown), and as Kirk blithely tells her, "Pack up your slippers, Cinderella, the ball is over." To add to the insult to poor Grace Lee Whitney, they have apparently tried to make Hot Yeoman 4.0 a Rand look-alike, giving her a blonde beehive _nearly_ as ridiculous as Rand's but without the weird woven thing.   
  
Though it's nice to see Uhura finally get off the bridge, Schneider completely squanders that opportunity, giving her little to do and less to say. (And besides. She can improvise tunes on that crazy harp, but she can't figure out a simple keyboard instrument?) Sulu gets a few good 'asides,' as we used to call them in the old days, and there's some nice moments for Spock (my favorite being his explanation that "fascinating" is a term he reserves for the unexpected, whereas Trelayne's peculiarities merely rise to the level of "interesting"). Otherwise, though, you're mainly watching Trelayne swan about and asking yourself things like, "Why is it that watching Spock read Trelayne's message out loud to the crew somehow turns this whole thing into an episode of _The Electric Company_?" and "Could Trelayne make finding his mark any _more_ obvious?" and "How much time would it really have taken to get the whole cast together and agree on a standard pronunciation of 'Jaeger'?"  
  
As for the premise, well, here's a guy who gets a chance to write science fiction and we find out that what he really wants to write is costume drama. The one part where I felt like Schneider was doing something fresh was the chase sequence between the Enterprise and the planet Gothos. Visually it works better than most of the special effects and it sort of perfectly encapsulates the "this is so crazy stupid you can't believe it's gonna kill you, but it will" vibe sustained throughout the episode. There's the usual anxiety about humanity's ability to leave its violent past behind ("Our wars are peaceful, not for conquest," says Kirk. "Ah, but that's the official story," says Trelayne), though it's never really explained what Trelyane is supposed to be getting out of all this. Is this a legitimate part of his education...or is Trelayne just a particularly nasty little piece of work even amongst his fellow green glowing gendered blobs of light? The final fight sequence was, I have to say, extra-lame (partly because the 'forest' set is so bargain-basement that it's impossible to do a convincing 'hunt'), and it would not surprise me to learn that Trelayne's final whine to his parents was ad-libbed.   
  
No, the only thing that lifts this episode out of the mire at all is Trelayne himself--and camp, of course, is the wind beneath his wings. Not that they would ever go full-bore camp on ST:TOS--my guess is that Roddenberry would not have known camp if it bit him on the ass--but at certain moments, when you watch Trelayne flouncing his big ol' sleeves around, or ranting out his high displeasure, or most of all delivering some humiliating and catty zinger about how primitive human beings really are, you can sort of see a little bit of it coming through. Who knows, maybe that's one of the things that kept me watching.  
  
Next up: GOOOOOOOOOOOOOORN!!!!!!


	17. ARENA

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we meet the Gorn, and I do some ranting about the contemporary fetish for special effects.
> 
> This is the first and, I believe, the best of the "humans are coerced into battling it out with aliens for the benefit of a coercive third party" episodes. There would be so. Very. Many.

**STARDATE: August 29, 2011**

**ARENA**  
 **Teleplay by Gene L. Coon from a story by Fredric Brown**  
  
Oh, I’ve been waiting for THIS one.  
  
“Arena” is what we call ‘classic Trek.’ Now, ‘classic’ is a word that means different things to different people. When I say something is ‘classic Trek,’ what I mean is not necessarily that it is of superior artistic quality (often, in fact, quite the reverse), but that there is something about the episode that catches the quintessence of the show’s appeal to me. “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” is a decently constructed episode with comparatively few howlers embedded in it; but it is not, to my mind, ‘classic,’ because it does not capture the special je ne sais WTF? that made Star Trek more than just an embarrassing footnote to the history of cheesy 60s TV. Whereas, God help us, “Arena” is classic, despite…well, despite what you will soon encounter if you dare forge past the spoiler space.  
  
 **The Summary:** Kirk, McCoy, Spock, and several ‘tactical’ officers are preparing to beam down to an outpost on Sestus 3 presided over by an old buddy of Kirk’s who is known for his hospitality. (Best two lines of this episode—SPOCK: You are a sensualist, Doctor. MCCOY: You bet your pointy green ears I am.) They beam down and realize that the outpost has been destroyed, and that the bombardment is ongoing. The Enterprise, we learn from Sulu, is under attack by an alien ship. Kirk tells Sulu not to drop the deflectors until the ship is out of danger. While the tactical geniuses run off to engage the enemy, Bones and Spock find the old buddy, wounded but still alive. Kirk manages to get to the outpost’s arsenal (doing plenty of stop, drop  & roll along the way) and find a grenade launcher with which he blasts their unseen attackers. The alien ship beams up their party and hightails it; Kirk and crew are beamed aboard and a search party of 30 is dispatched in their stead to look for survivors. Kirk gives chase to the alien ship, bent on destroying it despite Spock’s objections about the value of sentient life, yada yada yada. We learn, incidentally, that it is dangerous for the Enterprise to travel at warp 7 or above for sustained periods of time, though Kirk has no problem urging them to Warp 8 in an effort to nail those bastards who massacred his buddy’s outpost. While passing a previously uncharted solar system, the alien vessel suddenly comes to a screeching halt. Kirk is stoked about this until his vessel comes to a screeching halt. A crude screensaver pattern appears on the main viewing screen (digitally enhanced, no doubt; but again, lipstick on a pig) along with an announcement from the “Metrons,” whose space they have entered. The Metrons find violence distasteful and are not disposed to allow the two vessels to destroy each other in their space. They find it far more civilized to take one representative from each vessel, strand them on a deserted planet, and have them fight to the death. The loser’s vessel will be destroyed by the Metrons, just to indicate how opposed to violence they are.  
  
So, Kirk disappears from the bridge (causing Uhura to utter a girly scream) and finds himself stranded at Vasquez Rocks, excuse me, on a sandy, barren, rocky alien planet inhabited only by his adversary, the captain of the Gorn ship.  
  
What is a Gorn? Well, a Gorn is basically a guy in a lizard suit. It’s a tall guy, with some serious muscles, wearing a loincloth and a strange neckerchief type thing which conveniently conceals the join between the toothy prosthetic head and the rest of the costume. A Gorn’s eyes are made out of wire mesh. A Gorn has an impressive array of teeth, which a Gorn never actually uses in combat because a Gorn cannot open his molded-rubber mouth. Gorns are much stronger than humans—a Gorn can throw an enormous boulder just like it was made of Styrofoam—but slower-moving than the average zombie. A Gorn, in other words, might be easily confused with a MOMIS were it not for the fact that since this episode is built around Kirk’s personal contest with this Gorn, it does not qualify as a localized “moment” of sucking, but rather a globalized all-pervasive suckiness. A Gorn, as a special effect, is absolutely and forever fixed to the time, place, and circumstances under which this episode was constructed. No contemporary form of visual entertainment could hope to get away with something this crude. Knowing this, our friends the digital “restorers” have heroically attempted to update the Gorn. They have digitally conferred on him the ability to blink.  
  
From now on, within these pages, the expression “lipstick on a pig” will be henceforth replaced with the expression, “eyelids on a Gorn.”  
  
Kirk’s initial attempt at physical combat with the Gorn (during which the producers, with heroic restraint, resist the urge to denude Kirk’s torso) convinces him that hand-to-hand combat will not be his friend; the Gorn is impervious to all his flying kicks and shoulder rolls and to what appears to be a mutual attempt to hug each other to death. Fortunately Kirk is able to scamper away from the torpid Gorn like a mammal outrunning a dinosaur. The Metrons have stated that the planet contains the materials necessary to construct a lethal weapon; but all Kirk sees as he looks around is a bunch of minerals and a load of diamonds and other precious stones that he would trade “for a hand phaser…or for a good solid club.” We know that he feels this way because the Metrons in their infinite wisdom have given each combatant a “recording” device (in the future, handheld recording devices will look strangely like the electric clippers found in present-day barbershops) with which to tape their impressions for the edification of posterity. Kirk doesn’t realize that these recording devices are also walkie-talkies, which means that he is literally broadcasting his heartfelt soliloquies (of which there are so very, very many) to his adversary.  While Kirk tries to come up with a plan, the Metrons inform the Enterprise that Kirk is losing. McCoy’s impassioned pleas and Spock’s less impassioned but equally insistent requests for a conference convince the Metrons to allow them to watch Kirk’s battle with the Gorn on their viewing screen, which makes this the second Trek episode in which the characters are forced to watch some TV of dubious quality and find it mesmerizing. Spock lets McCoy and the viewers at home in on the fact that potassium nitrate (which Spock can identify just by looking at it, cause honey badger has some kind of freaky sixth sense for unidentified white powders), sulfur, and charcoal are the ingredients for gunpowder. Kirk, slowly, figures this out, and begins laboriously gathering materials. Meanwhile the Gorn, heretofore limited in his vocalizations to hissing and growling, informs Kirk that he’s been listening in and promises to kill him quickly if he will stop this irritating running around and present himself for execution. The Gorn claims that Sestus 3 was an invasion of Gorn space and that the ‘massacre’ was their attempt to defend their territory and repel an invasion.   
  
Kirk goes on putting together his homemade cannon and finally fills the Gorn’s hide full of diamondshot. The Gorn topples over, but is still moving when Kirk finds him. Just as Kirk is about to stab the Gorn to death with the Gorn’s own finely honed obsidian spike, he suddenly decides not to, says, “Maybe you were just defending your own people,” and yells to the invisible Metrons that they will have to “find their entertainment somewhere else.” The Gorn disappears, and high up on a distant peak materializes a blond ephebe clad in shining raiment who informs Kirk that by showing the advanced trait of mercy he has convinced the Metrons that humans have some potential and therefore the Metrons will allow them to survive. The Metron offers to have the Gorn ship destroyed; Kirk declines, suggesting they might work out their differences with the Gorn via diplomacy. The Metron suggests condescendingly that in about a thousand years maybe humans will be ready to establish relations with their own society, and then shazam, Kirk is back on the bridge and the Enterprise is clear on the other side of the galaxy. Spock tells Kirk that after the cannon blast they lost the transmission, and urgently desires to know how the fight ended. Kirk cryptically replies that humans show a lot of potential for a predatory species; after some byplay about this, Kirk orders Sulu to take the Enterprise back “to where we’re supposed to be”—which I fucking HOPE is Sestus 3, because don’t you guys still have a 30-member search party combing that place for survivors? **END SUMMARY**  
  
Well, this episode answers one of my burning questions: Why was the first Trek slash pairing Kirk/Spock, when Spock/McCoy would have been so much more plausible? That exchange in the transporter room clears it all up. Being from a species that only has sex once every seven years, Spock must naturally be a little underconfident about his ability to perform. Kirk is clearly not picky; his standards for good sex must be encouragingly low. Those sensualists, on the other hand…they’re hard to satisfy.   
  
But I digress.  
  
Here’s what I mean about this being classic Trek. In “Arena” we have a perfect and magical blend of heartbreakingly naïve filmmaking and heartbreakingly naïve idealism. Though the form, taken on its own, may be the purest dreck, and the content, taken on its own, may be an equal pile of horseshit, put together they create a strangely compelling harmony which appealed very strongly to my naïve adolescent soul.   
  
The adult me looks at the idealism with exasperated rage. First of all, one must note the irony of the highly evolved and peaceful Metrons “preventing” a violent conflict in their territory by forcing two individuals into brutal combat and then destroying the unlucky comrades of whichever creature turns out to be less violent. This is the same irony embedded at the core of _The Day the Earth Stood Still_ and it’s amazing that nobody involved in making either text seems to have spotted it. It suggests that even while strenuously attempting to imagine a peaceful resolution to human conflict the writers were unable to get away from an idea which in fact contributes significantly to human conflict, which is that the solution to violence is always more violence.  
  
Second, let’s talk about the revelation that the Gorn ship was merely defending its own territory—which apparently makes the massacre of the unsuspecting men, women, and children on Sestus 3 understandable and even justifiable. McCoy, not normally a model of open-mindedness when it comes to alien species, is shattered by this discovery and instantly willing to believe that the Federation is “in the wrong.” (A somewhat cannier Spock observes that this question is best settled by diplomats.) Why, the adult me groans out with the ineffable weariness of someone who has lived through the first decade or so of this horrendous century, does the idea that Sestus 3 was somehow in Gorn territory make the massacre of a large number of civilians OK? Obviously, the adult me answers, because McCoy and everyone else on this crew recognize the massacre of said civilians as exactly the kind of thing they would do—and what’s more, be right to do—under the same circumstances. In fact, this is exactly what Kirk was doing by hunting down the Gorn ship. Kirk’s impressive show of ‘mercy’ at the end of the combat testifies to his willingness to give his adversary the same consideration he would want extended to him—something which I actually do not sneer at, given the abysmally lowered ethical standards of my own period of American geopolitics. But Kirk’s ‘mercy’ absolutely does not challenge another basic premise that drives human conflict, which is that when you are defending what you have defined as ‘your territory,’ any use of violence against civilians becomes justifiable. Instead, this ‘mercy’ confirms Kirk’s faith in that principle by revealing that it is more important to Kirk to acknowledge the Gorn’s right to defend his own territory than it is to put a spike through the neck of the loathsome reptile that’s spent the past 20 minutes trying to kill him.   
  
We will pass over for now the use of a loathsome reptile as a metaphor for the Other who stands in the way of colonial expansion, merely noting that the brutal massacre of the defenseless outpost, the desert setting, the Gorn’s tunic, and the sticks/rocks/vines weapons that the Gorn constructs rather persistently present the Gorn as the evil Indian in what is an only superficially disguised Western.  
  
Well, that’s the adult me. The adolescent me was far more willing to take this episode on its own terms. While logically nonsensical, for instance (given the Metron’s promise to eliminate the loser’s ship), the idea of preventing a full-scale battle in favor of hand-to-hand combat between the two leaders appeals strongly to someone who understands virtually nothing about the economic considerations motivating warfare. Indeed, even the adult me could have been heard to observe, back in the day, that it’d be a damn sight easier on the world if we could just put George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein in a barrel and let them fight it out. But of course this assumes that warfare is irrational—that wars are fought, not for material gain, but purely out of some personal desire for conquest lurking in the corrupted hearts of world leaders. And this is the attitude that Star Trek generally takes toward war: that it is the expression of some savage uncontrollable urge to violence which is intrinsic to the species. This is precisely why the Vulcans are imagined as having cured their own tendencies toward violence (asked by Trelayne whether Vulcans are predatory, Spock replies, so very deliciously, “Not generally…but there have been exceptions”) through the elimination of emotion in favor of “logic,” by which the writers often mean the ability to be rational in a situation where a human male would yield to his erotic and/or violent impulses. Because if you could only conquer your personal urge to choke the shit out of somebody and view the situation rationally, violence would never seem to you like a good idea.  
  
Allow me to pause while I mourn the death of the me who was capable of believing that it was that simple.   
  
I am comforted during this pause only by the reflection that the me who believed that was also the me who failed to understand how strongly gendered this understanding of violence is. It is, in fact, closely linked to the ideas about masculinity on view in “The Enemy Within,” which fuses Kirk’s libidinal drives toward sex and violence in rape and presents both as essential elements of human masculinity; and in “The Galileo Seven,” where Spock’s lack of an instinctual ‘human’ desire to clobber the alien who has just clobbered you almost gets everyone killed.  
  
Anyway.   
  
The literary counterpart to the naivete made visible in the Gorn is the device of having Kirk unburden himself to his electric clippers. Clearly, this is intended to solve the problem of how to get the spectators into Kirk’s head when he has nobody down there to talk to. A more sophisticated production team might have decided to go balls-out and see this as a golden opportunity for Shatner to do a little acting tour-de-force and communicate his thoughts purely through movement and facial expression. Then again, perhaps, this production team knew enough about Shatner not to try that experiment. So instead we get these little monologues which make no sense given that he’s racing against time to construct a weapon capable of offing the Gorn but which do convey his isolation/vulnerability/despair in crude yet effective ways. Interestingly, once Kirk actually hatches a plan and cheers up, the voiceovers end and his actions and the plucky ingenuity behind them are interpreted for the viewers by an increasingly impressed Spock. I guess the soliloquies indicate that we’re still watching HamletKirk, while as soon as a plan of action occurs to him we switch over to HoratioHornblowerKirk, who is too busy building cannons to introspect.  
  
When the Metron shows up, s/he says to Kirk, “Does my appearance surprise you?” To which Kirk should by rights reply, “Of course it doesn’t fucking surprise me—you’re the fucking Spirit of Athenian Democracy.” I swear these guys all took the same western civ course, and that in this western civ course, great stress was placed on the opposition between the cultured, urbane, sophisticated, beauty-loving, but effete Athenians and the martial and manly (except for that whole army of lovers thing) Spartans. Naturally the highly evolved “Metron” is an androgynous “boy” wearing a chiton whose extreme whiteness is outdone only by his personal blondness.  (The name “Metron” almost appears to anticipate the term “metrosexual.”) The “Metron” also looks a lot like the Eloi from H. G. Wells’s “Time Machine,” probably because both were working from a common source Q. In fact, the Metrons also look a lot like the jogging blonde bimbos from TNG’s infamous “Justice”…but let’s not go there, my stomach is already upset.


	18. TOMORROW IS YESTERDAY

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dorothy Catherine Fontana's first solo flight turned out to be disappointing; but we can look at it as a warm-up to work she did later in "City on the Edge of Forever." It also reminds me unpleasantly of the Season Two ender "Assignment: Earth," but D. C. Fontana cannot be blamed for that mess. In general, we should remember--as I sometimes forgot--that Fontana didn't have final creative control over her own scripts, and that the Hand of Roddenberry could always be partially responsible for any of the badness of any given episode.

**STARDATRE: September 4, 2011**

**TOMORROW IS YESTERDAY**   
**Written by: D. C. Fontana**

Or, as it is known among the epicures on Sestus 3, "In Which We Save Some Dough By Setting Most of the Episode On Present-Day Earth."  
  
  
 **The Summary:** Whilst en route to Starbase 9, the Enterprise unexpectedly passes by a "dark star" (in the future, the term "black hole" will have been rejected as either too prosaic or too obscene) which nearly sucks them into its ship-crushing gravitational maelstrom. The Enterprise escapes, but is whiplashed through space and time. Picking themselves off the floor of the bridge (in the future, there will be no seatbelts), the crew dusts themselves off and tries to figure out where they are. Uhura picks up a radio broadcast about the first manned moonshot, which tips them off to the fact that they are orbiting Earth sometime in the late 1960s. We the viewers already know this, since the opening sequence shows an air base scrambling some fighter jets to investigate a "UFO," which turns out to be the Enterprise. The first jet to catch sight of the Enterprise is piloted by Captain John Christopher. As the Enterprise pulls up out of Earth's atmosphere (more on this later), Christopher gives chase; Kirk decides to lock onto the jet with a tractor beam. Spock belatedly informs Kirk that this plane was not built to withstand such things. The plane breaks apart, but not before Captain John Christopher is beamed aboard the Enterprise. Kirk welcomes him aboard, and opportunities for fucking up the timeline begin to multiply like rabbits.   
  
While Kirk is showing Christopher around the bridge like a kid on a first playdate with a new best friend, Spock harshes his mellow by pointing out that they can't return Christopher to Earth because he knows too much about the future and this might lead to him changing the timeline. Informed of this, Christopher points out that not returning him would change things too; Spock dryly observes that Christopher has made "no significant contribution" to history. A somewhat chastened Christopher then points out that before breaking up he took film of the Enterprise and that there are probably audiotapes of his conversations with ground control as well. After a failed escape attempt, Spock informs Kirk, McCoy, and Christopher that in fact, Christopher does have to go back after all, because his as-yet-unborn son will head the first Earth-Jupiter probe. Scotty also points out, living up to what seems at this point to be a surprisingly doom-and-gloom characterization, that although the warp engines can be fixed up just fine, "we've nowhere to go in this time."   
  
Well, while Spock works on figuring out a way to get back to the future, there's nothing else for it but for Kirk and Sulu to beam down to the base (still in their Starfleet uniforms) to find and destroy the evidence. Kirk, who may or may not be a decent starship captain but is an unbelievably LOUSY burglar, gets the two of them caught red-handed by a guard who, having confiscated their communicators, accidentally activates the emergency signal on Kirk's and gets himself beamed aboard the Enterprise. Kirk informs the Enterprise of the situation and they confine the guard to the transporter room, where he is amazed by the transporter room chief's demonstration of the automated food dispensing system (in the past, people have forgotten that there was ever such a thing as an automat). Kirk and Sulu, having successfully retrieved the tapes, then head into the darkroom for the pictures. This trips an alarm which brings three guys down upon them; but Kirk manages to fight off all three at once while Sulu beams himself back with the tapes. Kirk then gets grilled by the officers, bravely standing up to their fearsome interrogation tactics, which include calling the subject a wise guy and repeating their questions over and over in aggravated tones. Christopher talks Spock into taking him down to the base with him to rescue Kirk. Spock, Christopher, and Sulu beam down and take care of the officers who were interrogating Kirk. Christopher then pulls a gun on Kirk, demanding to be allowed to stay; Spock nerve-pinches him and up they all go to the Enterprise. Spock has worked out what he thinks is a way to get back to their own time, which involves the ever-popular slingshot-around-the-sun move. This allows them to rewind the clock and replace Christopher and the guard at exactly the moments when they were beamed in; they will of course not remember any of what now did not actually happen, so the timeline problems are solved. The Enterprise encounters some dramatic difficulties on re-entry, but fortunately they are greeted by Starbase 9 and the ship doesn't blow up and everything's fine, and on we go. The end.  
  
I've never liked time travel stories. Actually, that's not totally true. I don't like the way most science fiction writers approach time travel stories. It is entirely possible that this is due to my having only a very tenuous grasp on basic elements of Einsteinian physics. I can handle time travel stories in a fantasy context--Octavia Butler's _Kindred_ , for instance, which makes no attempt to account for the time traveling or describe its mechanism in pseudorational terms, or _Time And Again_ , in which the mechanism for time travel makes psycho-historical sense but not physics-sense. But when we get to the supposedly rational though relativistic laws of the space-time continuum, it starts to bother me when things fail to make sense.   
  
This is all just to say that "Tomorrow is Yesterday" failed to stir any deep feelings in me apart from irritation. There is some cute McCoy/Spock stuff:  
  
 **MCCOY: Shouldn't you be working on your time calculations?**  
 **SPOCK: I am.**  
 **\--------**  
 **KIRK: Now you're starting to sound like Spock.**  
 **MCCOY: If you're gonna get nasty, I'm gonna leave.**  
  
It is also sort of funny to watch Kirk stuck down there on the air force base as things go from bad to worse. Kirk's boyish enthusiasm at meeting a fellow-pilot from the olden days is sort of endearing, and there is a certain poignance in Christopher's plight (not only does the poor guy get sucked out of a clear blue sky and then told he can't go home, but he is informed by a completely indifferent Spock that he will never make any significant contribution to history). We also learn that before the UFP was cooked up the Enterprise was supposed to be working for something called the United Earth Space Probe, and we get our first look at the food dispensers in action. Uhura has more to do than usual (though she is also required to put herself in some very awkward positions during all the 'rocking the bridge' sequences) and it's nice to see Sulu getting some action.   
  
All that aside, though, the whole thing struck me as kind of poorly conceived. In order for this plot to happen, Kirk has to behave in what even for him is an uncharacteristically stupid way. I mean, I know Kirk isn't as smart as, say, Spock (hey, shut the fuck up, earthling--honey badger can fucking multitask!). But still. During the course of this episode, Kirk:  
  
1) Decides to use the tractor beam on a 1960s era airplane, for reasons that remain unclear to me.  
  
2) Has no idea that giving an Air Force pilot from the 1960s a guided tour of a 22nd-century starship might create some temporal complications down the road.  
  
3) Has to have it pointed out to him that until they get back to their own time, he and his crew are pretty much fucked.  
  
4) Decides to beam himself personally into the middle of an air force base while wearing his Starfleet uniform and carrying technology certain to cause untold temporal pollution if it is confiscated. This despite the fact that any rational person thinking about this for five minutes would realize that once the Enterprise got back to its own time, it wouldn't matter how many grainy photographs and snippets of audiotape existed in the Air Force's records, or how many stories Christopher told about going up to an alien spaceship and meeting guys from the future. This also despite the fact that if Kirk was talking to Spock at all he should have known that if their attempt to get home worked they would be able to solve the timeline problem without doing any of this.  
  
It seemed to me like Fontana desperately wanted to write that caper on the base. And sure, it's funny...but again, as a lost and fallen 21st century American, I find much of that sequence laughable in a more bitter and non-enjoyable way. [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) said it all, during the fight scene in which Kirk tackles 3 armed and paranoid Air Force officers: "Why doesn't anyone shoot him?" The idea that our guys are such genuinely nice folks that they would not use extreme force on a strange man they found in the midst of their high security base fucking with their top secret photography...well, I guess people might have believed in it back then.  
  
Also highly irritating is the 'humorous' subplot Fontana introduces in which Kirk is repeatedly irritated by the computer (now, I believe, finally voiced by Majel Barrett) purring its responses to him in a throaty voice and calling him "dear." The story about this is that the Enterprise docked for repair at a planet where the society is "dominated by women" who felt that the computer system "lacked a personality" and "gave it one--female of course." This 'female' computer, in addition to being too "affectionate," also has "an unfortunate tendency to giggle." Come ON, Dorothy Catherine! You're really letting the team down here.  
  
I suppose, to her, the point might have been to get her revenge by forcing Kirk et al. to deal with all these annoying stereotypically "feminine" traits; that computer does certainly annoy the shit of out both Kirk and Spock, and I can see a way in which Fontana might have derived considerable satisfaction from vicariously tormenting them this way. Nevertheless, when you throw in the fact that Christopher's existing _daughters_ seem to have had no more effect the timeline than he did, but that the forthcoming _son_ will make history...it just makes an already annoying episode that much more annoying.   
  
Ah well. Next up: "Court Martial."


	19. COURT MARTIAL

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This episode is a hot mess in a thousand different ways, but it has some golden moments. There must be a very interesting story about what happened to this episode in production, because to me it seems obvious that they had to do a lot of last-minute cutting to make it fit the hour. If you thought the "trial" storyline in season 3 of _Downton Abbey_ was infuriatingly lame, wait till you get a load of this "courtroom drama," which has many of the same problems...to the 100th power.

**STARDATE: September 13, 2011**

**COURT MARTIAL**  
  
**Written by: Don M. Mankiewicz and Steven Carabatsos from a story by Don M. Mankiewicz**  
  
I remember this episode better under its alternative title, “Surely You Didn’t Think We’d Blow All That Dough On Dress Uniforms And Then Only Use Them Once.”  
  
**The Summary:** The Enterprise, having been severely damaged in an ion storm, puts into a starbase (eleven, I believe) for repairs. There was only one casualty: Lieutenant Commander Ben Finney, who was still in the ‘ion pod’ when it had to be jettisoned to protect the ship. Kirk has just signed and submitted his sworn deposition about the incident (in the future, affidavits will be called depositions) to Commodore Stone when Spock shows up with an extract from the ship’s computer log recording the incident. While Kirk fends off an attack from Finney’s griefstricken tweenaged daughter, who accuses him of murdering her father, Stone reads the log and accuses Kirk of perjury. Kirk swears that he jettisoned the pod at the last possible moment and after the ship was already on red alert. The log records that he jettisoned the pod while the ship was on yellow alert. Kirk is baffled. An inquiry is launched; given the opportunity to accept a ground assignment rather than be disciplined, Kirk heroically demands to be courtmartialed. Kirk, having been snubbed by all his old Starfleet buddies, takes comfort in having a drink with his former flame Areel Shaw, who recommends a brilliant defense lawyer named Simon T. Cogley. She herself cannot serve in this capacity, because she’ll be the attorney prosecuting him. Kirk returns to his quarters to discover that the brilliant Simon T. Cogley has moved in and filled his living room with law books (in the future, law books will look exactly like they do now). Cogley launches into an impassioned defense of the book and tirade against the computer.  
  
The courtmartial begins. Shaw calls Spock, McCoy, and Hot Yeoman 5.0—I’m sorry, she’s now been promoted to Hot Ensign and transferred to Human Resources--as witnesses against Kirk. Hot Ensign confirms that long ago, Kirk was responsible for reporting an error on Finney’s part which Finney believed blighted his career. Cogley has no questions for any of the prosecution’s witnesses. Cogley then calls Kirk, gets into a spat with Shaw about entering Kirk’s service record full of commendations and medals and citations for “conspicuous gallantry” (Starfleet gives awards for flirting? Well I’m sure it was well-deserved), allows Kirk to grandstand, and then turns Kirk over to Shaw. Shaw then plays the extract from the computer log, which shows Kirk’s hand pressing the jettison button while the ship is still on yellow alert. Kirk is yet more baffled; Cogley appears shaken.  
  
Spock, back on the Enterprise, continues the hopeless search for a computer malfunction. Pretty sure he’s going down, Kirk ruefully observes to Spock that on the bright side, “maybe you’ll be able to beat your next captain at chess.” Spock is next discovered by an irate McCoy playing chess against the ship’s computer. Deducing from Spock’s four victories that something has gone wrong with the computer’s programming “and therefore the memory,” Spock and McCoy rush back to the starbase.  
  
Cogley is trying to get Kirk to change his plea when Finney’s tweenage daughter reappears, explaining that she didn’t really mean it, she knows it wasn’t Kirk’s fault, he should change his plea and take the ground assignment. (Perhaps she was initially upset by the fact that in the future, mourning garb for tween girls will consist of a sateen and velour sailor suit with a gladiator skirt, the general effect of which is to make the mourner look as if she is a Roman decurion auditioning for the part of Reno Sweeney in the legion’s drag production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes.) Cogley cryptically murmurs that he is “about to be” ready for his defense; nevertheless, when they reappear in the courtroom, he rests his case.  
  
Spock and McCoy burst in. Cogley convinces the court to reopen the case by delivering a stirring oration about human rights (in the future, the now-dead concept of universal human rights will be resurrected in the Declarations of the Martian Colonies) and Kirk’s right to confront the witnesses against him, viz., the ship’s computer. The court reconvenes on board the Enterprise, where Cogley suggests that Finney is not actually dead and is hiding on the ship. Their stratagem for finding Finney involves sending the entire crew (minus Spock, McCoy, Kirk, and two other guys) down to the starbase and then isolating the sound of Finney’s heartbeat. Kirk is—amazingly—allowed by the court to go down to engineering and confront Finney alone, which leads to a verbal and fistiful confrontation during which a scenery-chomping Finney vents his rage and hatred upon Kirk and discloses that he has sabotaged the ship’s energy circuits. When Kirk reveals that Finney’s tween daughter has been secretly brought on board by Simon Cogley, a “beaten and sobbing” Finney tells Kirk what he broke. Kirk crawls through the conduits fixing stuff; the ship rights itself; and in view of the fact that Finney clearly faked his own death and tampered with the computer in order to destroy Kirk’s career and then sabotaged the ship in hopes of destroying it, the case against Kirk is dismissed. Kirk kisses Areel goodbye on the bridge; Areel mentions that Cogley’s next case will be defending Finney in his own disciplinary hearing. Areel says goodbye; in answer to the unspoken commentary from Spock and McCoy, Kirk says, “She’s a very good lawyer.” Spock and McCoy agree; and on we boldly go. **END SUMMARY**

  
I asked Mrs. Plaidder if she would be willing to guest review this episode. She declined. Nevertheless, I would like to acknowledge at the outset that much of my ranting will be indebted to her own far better informed and therefore far more exasperated ranting.  
  
First of all, though as usual I have no actual knowledge of the history behind the making of this episode, evidence strongly suggests that this script used to be longer and was clumsily hacked down to episode size after it was shot. Carabatsos, who is usually credited as a script consultant, is credited on this one as a co-author, which I figure is not a good sign. Certainly it must have been difficult to shove a trial AND a manhunt AND a Dramatic Confrontation AND saving the Enterprise from yet another decaying orbit AND all the rhetoric about the computer vs. humanity AND Kirk’s old flame being forced to turn on him just like his loyal officer buddies AND whatever the hell is going on with Jame the tweenaged daughter into fifty-odd minutes. This would have been a better candidate for a two-parter than “Menagerie” was.  
  
Cogley’s dialogue often appears to be setting something up that never happens.  At the end of Jame’s second appearance, Cogley seems to be having an epiphany; but when he arrives in the courtroom in the next scene he does nothing. After Kirk heads off to confront Finney, there are two unusually intrusive voiceovers which are not identified as captain’s log entries and which appear to be a desperate attempt to convey information which was once conveyed in scenes that got cut—including the information that the mysterious “errand” Cogley beams down to do while they’re hunting for Finney involved finding Jame and bringing her on board. Cogley justifies declining to cross-examine Shaw’s witnesses by saying he’s been waiting to get the “preliminaries” out of the way. After that happens, though, all he does is showboat for a few minutes, get ambushed, and roll over. It appears likely that originally there was a plan for Cogley to do some behind-the-scenes investigation—probably involving Jame and the old letters she mentions—which he would then spring dramatically on the prosecution, thus proving how kick-ass he really is.   
  
But perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps Cogley was always intended to be that incompetent. Areel Shaw is equally incompetent, and if anything even more unprofessional. But that, of course, could be the sexism talking. It is interesting watching these 1960s-era actresses trying to do ‘masculine’ things. In the courtroom scenes, Joan Marshall—hampered from the start by that ridiculous red miniskirt with its regulation off-center v-neck—can’t get either her body or her voice to be assertive enough for a prosecuting attorney. But this is a minor point compared to the howling idiocy of the case she puts on. Mrs. Plaidder pointed out that the main problem with her case is also the major problem with the episode’s plot: nobody ever establishes the facts. She should, for instance, have had to prove that Finney actually died. She never asks anyone to explain why it was necessary to jettison the pod in the first place, and in fact nobody in the episode ever explains that. The only facts she establishes are that a) Finney had a grudge against Kirk and b) according to the computer log, Kirk pressed the jettison button before he claims he did. Her direct examination of Spock yields nothing apart from Spock’s confirmation that the Enterprise computer is not broken, and she allows him to go on at length about how Kirk could not possibly have done what he’s accused of doing. Calling McCoy as an expert on space psychology (in the future, the medical profession will reject specialization entirely and all doctors will practice all branches of medicine) makes no sense; all she gets out of him is the grudging acknowledgment that it is “possible” that Kirk might respond to Finney’s hatred of him by starting to hate Finney. Obviously the only reason these witnesses are really called is to create the drama of Kirk’s best friends being forced ever so reluctantly to turn on him.  
  
During her highly irregular rendezvous with Kirk in the bar, Shaw says that the prosecution will build its case on “Kirk vs. the Computer.” Clearly this is the only thing the writer(s) really cared about. From that point of view, Cogley’s spirited defense of the book over the database is reason enough to believe he’s kick-ass. And normally I would have tremendous sympathy with this, since I love books and firmly believe that they cannot and will not be superseded by ebooks or Kindles or what have you. But I speak here of literature. When it comes to the law, that’s totally not true. Cogley can froth all he wants about the code of Hammurabi, but the effective practice of law depends less on your knowledge of ancient jurisprudence than on your intimate knowledge of the decision just handed down last Tuesday by those assholes on the Fifth Circuit. Mrs. Plaidder informs me that the kind of law books seen littering Kirk’s quarters are now to be found primarily in libraries, since most actual lawyers do their research in online databases which are constantly updated. The arbitrariness of Cogley’s preference for the physical book purely for its own sake is underscored by his farewell present to Kirk, identified only as “a book.” Shaw points out that it’s “not a first edition or anything,” but that the fact that it’s a book is enough to make it “special.” Its bookness is what matters, not what it actually says. In fact, Kirk never even unwraps it; it is merely a talismanic object containing some sort of unspecified but sacred power.  
  
It is too bad that these characters haven’t figured out yet that whenever you are in a hopeless position, someone should always say the word “chess” out loud. That’s what gets them out of the jam in “The Corbomite Maneuver,” and that’s what happens here. I remember back in the day when they were working hard on creating a computer that could beat a grand master at chess. Nowadays we have just accepted that computers do shit human beings can’t do, and we cope with it by making the computers so small that we can step on them if they get ornery. The writers seem to imagine the computer as more organic than I at least understand mine to be; somehow, whatever Finney did to the computer to fake that record log had a system effect, gradually weakening the computer’s strength so that it fails to function properly across the board. I don’t know from memory and programming but it seems to me that the real focus is on challenging the computer’s infallibility rather than demonstrating how Finney faked the evidence (something which, again, is never explained).   
  
There are some great little McCoy moments, especially his busting in on Spock’s chess game; Spock now bats back McCoy’s little barbs without missing a beat, and the two of them seem to be really enjoying their double act. And it is nice to see Kirk paired up with a woman who is slightly mature-looking and who is (supposed to be) an intelligent professional, even if she is contractually obligated to look stricken when Kirk testifies that nothing is more important to him than his ship. But otherwise…bring on the archons!


	20. RETURN OF THE ARCHONS

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This episode is also kind of a hot mess, but it is much more compelling and, frankly, bizarre. The story is by Gene Roddenberry; and as you will see as we go through the seasons, when Gene Roddenberry put sex in a plot, things always got very weird and usually rather violent. Also please to note that the creators of the much-ballyhooed 2013 film _The Purge_ have stolen their plot straight from this episode.
> 
> This one is notable not only for the first invocation of the Prime Directive (discussed below), but as the first iteration of a plot that will reappear many times which pits Kirk against a computer which proves to be no match for his chaotic irrationality. One wonders how Spock stands it.

**STARDATE: September 16**

**RETURN OF THE ARCHONS**  
 **By Boris Sobelman from a story by Gene Roddenberry**  
  
Are you of the body? Cause you will need some @#@$! peace and tranquility if you go behind the cut tag.  
  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise has returned to Beta III to try to find out what happened to the starship Archon which was last heard of in that general vicinity 100 years earlier, and sent Sulu and a guy named O’Neill down to investigate. Though they have attempted to adopt the local costume, they are about a hundred years off; Sulu and O’Neill are outfitted in colonial-era breeches and three-cornered hats, while the locals have moved on to nineteenth century Amishwear.  Anyway, they run afoul of the Lawgivers, a bunch of brown-hooded-and-robed guys with long hollow tubes. O’Neill unwisely tries to run for it; Sulu is beamed up, but not before the Lawgiver has zotted him with a tube. Back aboard the Enterprise, a smiling and glassy-eyed Sulu begins telling everyone what bliss it is to be of the body and at one in Landru and how the planet is paradise. Since they can’t figure out how to fix Sulu, Kirk, McCoy, Spock, and two other guys beam down, this time getting the period right. They are freaked out by the supernaturally serene and slow-moving citizenry, who all have the same look of, how does Spock put it, “vacant contentment.” Kirk is just working out the fact that there is some “festival” coming up shortly when the clock strikes six. Instantly, the passersby scream in hellish fury and unleash a riot involving bricks, torches, jumping through plate-glass windows, screaming “FESTIVAL!”, open and notorious public necking, and guys grabbing women off the street and dragging them bodily into the shadows.  Kirk and the landing party run for shelter to a boarding house run by Reger, who turns out to be in the resistance.   
  
Resistance to what, you might ask. Well, you see, there’s this guy named Landru. And he controls everyone’s minds.  And he has these Lawgivers who punish dissent and disobedience. And if you don’t do like Landru says, you get ‘absorbed’ into ‘the body.’    
  
Morning comes.  At 6:00 am festival is over, and everyone snaps back into tranquilized-bliss mode. When one of the believers fetches the Lawgivers over to the boarding house, Kirk—who doesn’t do ‘vacant contentment’ very convincingly—flat-out refuses to go with them to be ‘absorbed.’ This throws the Lawgivers for a loop. While they ‘commune,’ Reger leads the landing party to his safehouse, finding O’Neill (now ‘of the body’) along the way. In the safe house Kirk finally contacts the ship and discovers that some power source on the planet is frying the Enterprise with “heat beams.” Scotty informs him that the ship can’t escape without burning up, so finding this source and neutralizing it now becomes priority one.   
  
Alas, Landru, or rather his holographic projection, shows up and announces that they will all be absorbed. A hypersonic pulse pummels them into unconsciousness; they wake up in a dungeon. McCoy is missing. When he comes back, he’s smiling and talking about joy and tranquility and how happy he is to be of the body.  The Lawgivers then come for Kirk; direct resistance produces a threat of immediate death this time, so off he goes to be strapped to the wall and have an absorbo-ray aimed at him by a guy named Marplon, who comes on shift just at that moment. Spock is the next to be hauled out; on the way into the absorption chamber, he passes Kirk, who wishes him peace and contentment and the tranquility of being of the body. Marplon straps Spock in, pretends to zot him, and then tells Spock that he’s in the resistance too and that when the Lawgivers come to take him back he should fake being absorbed just like Kirk is faking it. So, back in the dungeon, Kirk and Spock plot while trying not to be overheard by McCoy, who is most suspicious of their “strange whispers.” Kirk and Spock then overpower the two lawgivers (Spock actually throwing a punch this time, upon which Kirk compliments him), dress up in their robes, and make Marplon take them to the Hall of Audience to meet this “Landru,” who they have a shrewd idea may not be a living being at all. Sure enough, when the projection of Landru appears and they point their phasers (helpfully restored to them by Marplon) at it, the wall melts and Toto grabs the curtain in his teeth and pulls it open to expose a little old guy from Kansas no wait I’m sorry I’ll start again.  
  
The wall melts, revealing “Landru,” or should I say LANDRU, an enormous computer which apparently contains the spirit of the original Landru, who lived six thousand years ago. Landru, everyone seems to assume, was a decent guy; but this LANDRU 5000 or whatever it is just doesn’t have the same magic. Phasering the computer doesn’t work, so Kirk does what he does best in these situations: he talks the computer into committing suicide. LANDRU is programmed to secure the health of the body; but as Kirk explains, without creativity the body dies, and LANDRU has pretty much squelched that. Smoke starts coming out of LANDRU as it self-destructs while talking to itself in an increasingly hysterical voice. Kirk then observes to Marplon that their society is free now and that he “hopes you’re up to it.” Back aboard the Enterprise, Scotty reports that the ship is fine now and Sulu is back to normal. So they all beam up, leaving behind on the planet the junior blond guy on the landing party, who is apparently a sociologist of some kind, along with a team of freedom coaches who will be helping the Beta IIIans adjust to the loss of their totalitarian guru/dictator and who is pleased to report, when Kirk checks in before warping out of orbit, that they’ve already had “two domestic disturbances and an all-out brawl.” Well, Kirk’s work here is done; so off they go, warp factor one. **END SUMMARY**

  
Joy to you, friend. Peace, and tranquility. We are one in the body. Have some trania. You will need it.  
  
Well, the big news here is the first invocation of the Prime Directive. Kirk and Spock figure out pretty soon after Landru’s ‘appearance’ in their dungeon that Landru’s got to be a computer, and that this computer is controlling the power source that’s trying to fry the Enterprise. This power source is the same thing that destroyed the Archon a hundred years earlier. There’s a whole thing about how the survivors of that disaster are known in Beta III lore as “archons” and that the reason Reger and Marplon are so stoked to see the landing party is that the return of the archons is “in fulfillment of prophecy.” You’d think that the arrival of the “archons” (and their eventual absorption/extinction) might explain—somehow—the fact that everyone on this planet has adopted a style of costume popular in the American west in the nineteenth century. But no connection is made, and the implausible replication of period-specific American clothing remains unaccounted for. Sulu makes a somewhat cryptic comment upon his return to the Enterprise that “THESE are the clothes they wear! Not THESE!” (referring first to his Starfleet uniform, and then to his Paul Revere duds). Which I suppose might have been intended to imply that the Beta IIIans are trying to replicate what the “archons” wore; but even so, I can’t see why the staff of a United Space Probe Agency starship should have been dressed up like 18th and/or 19th century Americans unless the crash happened to come during some sort of costume party. Perhaps initially the Archons were supposed to have a style of their own, but then they went overbudget buying Kirk more yellow jerseys, and all they could do with the costume budget they had left was go down to a theatrical supply store and hire the cheapest costume plot they could get. But I digress.  
  
Anyway, Reger and Marplon expect that the new “archons” will liberate them from the Lawgivers and their fearsome hollow tubes, but are most distressed to learn that Kirk plans to liberate them from Landru as well. When Kirk tells Spock that “the plug must be pulled” on Landru, Spock replies, “But the prime directive of noninterference.” And just as my brain is going all, “Oooh! Dingdingdingding! First invocation of the prime directive!” Kirk says, “That applies to a living, developing culture. Do you think that’s what this is?”  
  
Say WHAT?  
  
The Prime Directive, for those not of the TOS body, is basically the primary rule of engagement for the Enterprise: when you make contact with a new culture, you do not do anything to interfere with its organic development. The Prime Directive is the main thing distinguishing the Enterprise’s “five year mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations” from an evangelical, imperial, or capitalist mission. The Prime Directive is the foundation of much of the idealism investing Star Trek in all its incarnations and indeed the only thing that for me could in the long run make a show with this premise watchable.  
  
Now, those of us of the TOS body also know the dirty secret about the Prime Directive, which is that it gets violated a lot. And I’m not just talking about the way the Enterprise becomes a player in the battle waged between the Federation and the Klingon Empire for the goodwill and allegiance of nonaligned nations in the Third World, excuse me, for the goodwill and allegiance of nonaligned planets. I mean that when Kirk et al. are trapped in a situation where in order to save them you’d have to violate the Prime Directive, odds are about even that someone will go ahead and violate it. From that point of view, the Prime Directive is primarily a plot device, a way to generate drama and suspense without having to almost blow up the ship again.   
  
Here’s what I had never realized until I watched this episode again: According to Kirk, at any rate, the Prime Directive does not apply to all cultures. It applies only to those cultures judged by Kirk and other Starfleet decision makers to be “living” and “developing.”  
  
In other words, the Prime Directive contains within itself an ‘exception’ which renders it meaningless. Because if you let people like Kirk decide whether a culture is “living” enough to qualify for Prime Directive protection, then basically they will always do what Kirk does in this episode. Which is say, well, any culture that is not run by what I recognize as an American-style democracy, and which furthermore is inconveniencing me and my friends, can’t possibly be a “living” culture. Which basically means that there’s no real difference between the Prime Directive and the Bush Doctrine. In fact during the Bush years my parents read a hideous book by Bernard Lewis called What Went Wrong? which was all about how--and this is straight from the blurb of the book as it appears on Amazon.com--“Islamic civilization fell from worldwide leadership in almost every frontier of human knowledge five or six centuries ago to a ‘poor, weak, and ignorant’ backwater that is today dominated by ‘shabby tyrannies ... modern only in their apparatus of repression and terror.’” (Hey. Lewis. When’s your book on the ‘Arab spring’ coming out? Not soon, you say?) Throughout modern history the argument for imperialism has always depended on constructing the culture to be invaded as “backward,” stagnant, arrested, unable to progress without a special infusion of kickassery from the ultramodern imperial power, which of course is often compelled to start a war in order to persuade the people in this culture to embrace their own liberation. And let’s not even talk about the practice of leaving people behind as ‘advisors’ to ensure that the new regime is favorable to the Federation, excuse me, to help this new people learn to be free.  
  
So. Bad day for the Prime Directive. Sad now.  
  
Admittedly, there’s not much to recommend the culture on Beta III. Gene Roddenberry contributed the “story” for this episode, and it bears some of his hallmarks, including a typically Neanderthal and interestingly self-subverting understanding of human sexuality and gender in general. Roddenberry cannot, evidently, imagine a world in which human passions are always under control (and oddly, the Beta IIIans are always described by the Enterprise team as “human”); so he creates one in which enforced “tranquility” is balanced out by short but intense periods of pure libidinal frenzy. Though there’s a lot of violence involved in ‘festival,’ the focus is on the anarchic explosion of sexuality. Now, during ‘festival,’ the women are portrayed as totally into this. The first thing we see when the ‘red hour’ strikes is Tula, Reger’s daughter, morphing from sedate bun-wearing preacher’s daughter to writhing screaming bacchante, and there are other closeups of women looking on with madness in their eyes and lascivious leers upon their lips. Nevertheless, even though these women are as sex-crazed as the men, _they still have to get raped._ Not only do we see men picking women up and dragging them away, but after ‘festival’ is over we see Tula weeping in her father’s arms, presumably because she has been traumatized by ‘festival’ sex. While it is suggested that the men may not enjoy ‘festival’ a whole lot either—apparently older men can be ‘excused’ from the festivities—we don’t see any of them weeping after it’s over; and indeed Tula’s trauma is something that should be impossible on Beta III, where it appears that everyone else transitions seamlessly from frenzy to trance. What’s even stranger is the fact that Tula appears to have consented—lustily—to this activity at the time that it was performed. Apart from asserting that women are so alienated from sexuality (which of course is essentially and always masculine) that they can only experience it as a violation, this little scene seems to be there purely to serve as a symbolic marker for what is Wrong with this culture. And indeed that makes sense; as we all know, if you want to justify interfering with a culture, the easiest way to do it is to show how viciously that culture treats its women.  
  
McCoy’s big humanitarian contribution here, by the way, is to give Tula a sedative that puts her to sleep. I’m still trying to figure out how rendering a victim of sexual trauma unconscious is better than telepathically burying her trauma under involuntary peace and tranquility.  
  
So although most of Kirk’s rhetoric is about how peace and tranquility crush creativity and all the things that make life worth living and humanity worth protecting, the plot itself tells you that they didn’t think that Landru’s totalitarian imposition of peace and tranquility would be enough of an argument for Kirk’s intervention. Landru also has to be given a dark side involving violence, vandalism, and rape, just so we know that he Must Be Destroyed.  
  
The other thing we’re watching here, of course, is the origins of the Borg. After all, though it is dressed up in all these religious and cultlike trappings, what you’ve got on Beta III is a collective in which everyone’s personalities are merged into a central computer system which has assimilated, excuse me, ‘absorbed’ them. It is not hard to read through all this, incidentally, to the most notorious collective of Roddenberry’s time: the Soviet Union. Spock refers to the atmosphere on Beta III as the peace of the “factory,” and all the rhetoric about how without creativity the body dies could have been lifted from any one of a million defenses of capitalism against its antagonists. That final comment about how awesome it is that people are back to fighting with their spouses and each other underscores the basic message of all such defenses, which is that we have to accept the problems endemic to capitalism because it’s impossible to solve them without creating worse ones.   
  
We will pass over in silence the idea that feeding a computer data that its software cannot process will cause its hardware to blow up. Well, no, I won’t pass over it in silence. It’s a totally wack idea and I would say that it shows you how little people understood computers in the 1960s except that this idea remains surprisingly powerful today. I bet everyone reading this knows someone who believes that hitting the wrong button on their laptop will cause it to explode. I understand that the point is that Kirk goads LANDRU into attacking itself; but I still don’t see why LANDRU should attack itself by setting its circuits on fire when a fatal system error would suffice.  
  
Ah well. I was not surprised to see that Roddenberry wrote this story, because I know many of its elements will be back.  
  
Up next: KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!


	21. SPACE SEED

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a reason that they mined this episode for the first of the successful Star Trek movies. It's probably one of the all-around best episodes they did in Season One, and Montalban was...inimitable...as Khan. There are, you know, issues. But it still stands up. I hope Carey Wilbur, or his heirs, are still getting royalties.

**STARDATE: September 19, 2011**

**SPACE SEED**  
 **Written by Carey Wilbur and Gene L. Coon from a story by Carey Wilbur**  
  
This is an episode that needs no introduction. Nevertheless, let’s all scream it together:  
  
KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise finds a really old Earth space vessel floating in space, apparently derelict. It is, however, sending out a Morse code signal. In the future—oh, no, wait! It’s not the future! It’s the past! See, this spacecraft was manufactured in the 1990s, during a “strange and violent period” in our history known as the Eugenics Wars. During the 1990s, as I’m sure you all remember, a race of supermen (and superwomen, though they are rarely mentioned) who had been created by a selective breeding project carried out by a group of “ambitious scientists” trying to improve the human race seized power all over the world but wound up squabbling amongst themselves and taking each other out until the War Against Tyranny brought the whole superman conspiracy down. Though this is not recorded in the history books, about 80 of these superpeople were unaccounted for after the dust settled. Turns out they loaded themselves into a spaceship, put themselves in suspended animation, shot themselves into space, and traveled for 200 years until the Enterprise finally found them.  
  
Of course, not all of this is immediately obvious to Kirk and crew. He beams over to the ship along with Scotty, McCoy, and Lieutenant Marla McGivers, the ship’s historian. After helpfully identifying the vessel as a sleeper ship, McGivers, who is much struck by what a “handsome group of people” these superfolks are, falls instantly in love with one of them: a tall broadchested type who is, at the moment she becomes mesmerized by him, unconscious with a heart rate of four beats per minute, but nevertheless exuding charisma powerful enough to turn her brain into soup. The automatic controls begin reviving this stiff; but the unit malfunctions and Kirk has to get him out by breaking the glass and pulling him out of the box like a big ol’ frozen turkey.   
  
Back on the Enterprise, while the supermansicle thaws out under Dr. McCoy’s ministrations, Kirk tears into McGivers for her pathetic performance as a member of the landing party (boarding party, but whatever). McGivers admits when pressed that she does in fact find the men of the past exciting, since they were “bolder, more colorful,” and so on. She and Kirk leave; McCoy sits there at his desk, leaving Khan (for it is he) totally unattended and evidently not monitored in any way, so that when he revives, he’s able to slip out of bed, steal a scalpel from a wall display, and then grab McCoy and hold him at knifepoint. McCoy, in his best scene to date, is not impressed:  
  
 **MCCOY: Well, either choke me or cut my throat, make up your mind.**  
 **KHAN: Where am I?**  
 **MCCOY: You’re in bed, holding a knife to your doctor’s throat.**  
 **KHAN: What is this ship?**  
 **MCCOY: It would be most effective if you cut the carotid artery just under the left ear.**  
  
Look out, Spock! The Enterprise has itself a brand new honey badger!  
  
Anyway, Khan imperiously demands to see the captain. Kirk comes down and tries to find out who Khan is; Khan will only say that they should address him as Khan. He then asks if he can while away his convalescence while reading the Enterprise’s technical manuals. Kirk says sure, I see no way that could end badly.  
  
McGivers comes in to visit Khan, who immediately sets about seducing her. At a dinner party organized by McGivers in order to give the senior officers a chance to get a third wearing out of their dress uniforms, I’m sorry, to welcome Khan to their century, Spock and Kirk bait Khan into revealing that he was one of the dictators who lost the Eugenics Wars. McGivers goes to his quarters to apologize on behalf of her contemporaries. Khan then bends her to his will and gets her to promise to help him seize control of the ship. Meanwhile Spock, Kirk, and Scotty have figured out that Khan is Khan Noonian Singh, the “best of the tyrants…and the most dangerous,” who controlled most of Asia and the Middle East before the crash came. They put a security detail on him, but of course one boneheaded redshirt with a phaser ain’t gonna keep Khan bottled up. He busts out and with McGivers’s help goes over to his own ship to revive his 72 surviving comrades. By the time someone informs Kirk that Khan has escaped, they’ve come back to the Enterprise and taken the joint over. Khan jams the turbolifts and cuts off the oxygen supply to the bridge, threatening to suffocate the bridge crew if they don’t surrender. They don’t; so pretty soon everyone is draped over the furniture while Kirk spends his last breaths entering posthumous commendations into his captain’s log.  
  
But fear not, they are not dead. According to established supervillain protocol, which expressly states that under no circumstances may you ever summarily execute your adversary, what Khan then does is hold the rest of the bridge crew hostage in the briefing room and try to coerce them into cooperating with him by threatening to kill Kirk. This leads to yet another scene in which the characters are forced to watch TV—in this case, a live feed of Kirk trapped in McCoy’s decompression chamber. This sequence includes Uhura’s best scene yet, in which she bravely refuses to help Khan turn on the TV, despite being beaten up by one of Khan’s goons. She has absolutely no dialogue but every facial expression is pure gold. Makes you wish these people would write her a fucking part once in a while.   
  
Anyhow, Marla McGivers, now wearing her hair the way Khan likes it, begs to be excused. She slips out of the briefing room and sneaks into the decompression chamber, where the superman on duty turns out to be dumb as a bag of hammers. She busts Kirk out of the chamber and has just time to plead for Khan’s life before another goon marches Spock in. Kirk and Spock jump him. Spock runs off to flood all decks with neural gas. The gas anaesthetizes everyone except Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and Khan, who somehow makes it down to engineering and cuts off the conduit there. Kirk heads down for another knock-down drag-out man-to-man contest in engineering, which has been thoughtfully designed with a large open floor space and some nice screens to crash into. Kirk manages to club Khan into submission with a piece of the set just in time to stop the engines from blowing up.   
  
So, the bridge crew is back in charge, and Kirk convenes a hearing, making the wardrobe department happy yet again. Resplendent in his dress uniform, Kirk decides to drop all the mutiny-related charges. He will, instead of taking Khan and his buddies to a “reorientation center,” drop them all off on Ceti Alpha 5, a habitable but somewhat “savage” planet that they can all enjoy taming. Khan responds by asking Kirk if he’s ever read Milton, which gives us another author for the Stood the Test of Time list. He gives McGivers the choice of being courtmartialed or joining Khan et al. on Ceti Alpha 5. She decides to go with them, and Khan says that he will “take her.” Spock, evidently the only sane person in the room, muses that it would be interesting to come back 100 years from now to see what became of the “seed” Kirk has “planted.” “It would indeed,” says Kirk. **The end…OR THE BEGINNING?**  
  
/RICARDO MONTALBAN VOICE/ I love this episode…and I despise it./END RICARDO MONTALBAN VOICE/  
  
Purely _qua_ episode, this is probably the strongest one so far. The plot is engrossing and mostly believable (for Star Trek), the issues raised are still relevant, the acting is solid, the guest star is…inimitable…and as I’ve said, the ‘secondary’ characters do some of their best work so far. Which, by the way, raises one burning question I never thought to ask before:  
  
Where the fuck is Sulu?  
  
Yeah, we know all about the continuity thing with Khan recognizing Chekov in ST:II even though Chekov was not even on the show when they made this episode. But I was startled to discover that Sulu’s not in this one. He’s not in “A Taste of Armageddon” either, and they were shot close together, so it’s possible that Takei had some other gig going on and they had to write him out. But it’s a shame that Sulu was denied the chance to suffocate heroically on the bridge along with everyone else. And it would have been interesting to see Sulu’s take on Khan, whose characterization, as I’m sure you all realize, comes straight out of the Big Book of Orientalism (see Chapter 24, “Oriental Despotism”).   
  
Oh my, where to start. We will pass over the fact that they cast a Latino actor to play a Sikh, as this was totally par for the course back then; it appears that anyone who was neither white nor Black was considered capable of playing anyone else who was neither white nor Black. And anyway, who can imagine anyone else in this part? Though the character was written to be pretty heavy, Montalban finds some humor in Khan’s enormous vanity, and that really elevates things. It’s so much fun watching Khan tell Kirk to his face that he’s “inferior…mentally, physically.” As a veteran Latin lover he effortlessly pulls off the scenes with McGivers, though Madlyn Rhue is so weak and McGivers herself such a doormat that it’s hard to appreciate any of this what with all the fuming and the teeth-gritting and the PUKEWORTHINESS! OH, GOD, THE PUKEWORTHINESS!!  
  
Like some of the other female leads we’ve seen (see Dr. Helen Noel and Areel Shaw), McGivers is completely incompetent in her supposed profession. She’s emotionally and sexually obsessed with the Men of the Past; her quarters are filled with paintings she’s done of knights, Vikings, and so on. She fails to identify him as Khan Noonien Singh, despite the fact that she has studied his period and that Singh’s reign of terror was well documented, photographically and otherwise. Her characterization is an insult not just to women but to historians, as it suggests that instead of trawling the archives or analyzing data or finding shit out in an intellectually rigorous way, what historians mainly do is daydream and doodle. Kirk gets to manifest his own contempt for the humanities: “Here’s a chance for that historian to do something…what’s her name?” Bitch please, if it weren’t for historians, you wouldn’t even know there’d ever been a Eugenics War.    
  
But the absolute worst thing about McGivers is how much she loves being dominated. Because that’s what women really want, isn’t it, those Men of the Past who didn’t have to worry about shit like consent and dignity and equal rights. No, as Khan says, the Men of the Past “dare take what they want”—but it’s all OK, because that’s what women secretly want even though they might say no at the time. And you know what, I will accept the possibility that there are straight women out there who like their men on the forceful side. But Khan is deliberately cruel to her, on the assumption that this is the way to bond her to him—and he’s right. At their first meeting he tells her to stop wearing her hair in that “uncomplimentary fashion” and just gets up and starts taking down her bouffant. (Well, he tries. It’s a red wig, and he’s not able to do much with it. Later, when she starts wearing her hair down to please her man, you can totally see the color change between the red wig and her actual hair, which is closer to brown. It’s possible that the writers imagined she would have her own hair up in some sort of severe bun, which Khan could then let down; but hair and makeup just couldn’t bring themselves to do anything that simple.) When she comes to his quarters, and she asks him to stop putting the moves on her, he throws her away from him: “Go! Or stay, but do it because it is what you wish to do!” Then he makes her beg for it; and when she does, he takes her hand and starts crushing it while demanding that she “open her heart.” He extorts her promise to help with the mutiny while still crushing her hand, and throws her away from him again when she dares “question” him, eliciting her teary promise that she will “do anything you ask.” You know, this shit is why I always hated Wuthering Heights. “I love you even though you’re a sadistic fuck who loves to humiliate me! No! I love you BECAUSE you’re a sadistic fuck who loves to humiliate me! Torture me some more, Heathcliff, it makes me feel alive!” Even after McGivers has double-crossed Khan her first action after saving Kirk is to plead for Khan’s life. She’s wishy-washy, stupid, weak…how weak is she? So weak that when Khan agrees to “take her” as his consort on Ceti Alpha V, you’re torn between saying, “Real big of you, asshole,” and saying, “she’s totally not worthy.”   
  
There’s only one redeeming thing about McGivers’s characterization. She stops the goons from beating Uhura up. In fact, that’s most likely the point at which McGivers decided she was going to have to pull the plug on her boyfriend’s second career. It’s too bad that this is what it took to remind the Enterprise’s resident historian that you don’t get to be the supreme ruler of all Asia by being nice; but at least it means that for one brief moment we see one woman helping another woman out.  
  
Anyway, so, Marla McGivers, letting the team down. But let’s not be too hard on Marla, because the men on the Enterprise fall for Khan too. There’s an incredible scene in the briefing room—incredible in the not-good way—when they first identify Khan and Scotty, McCoy, and Kirk are discussing his 1990s-era exploits. Scott admits to having a “sneaking admiration” for Singh, and Spock is progressively horrified at the way Kirk and McCoy share in, as Spock puts it, this “romanticization of a brutal dictator.” Kirk finally tells Spock not to worry, “we can admire him and be against him all at the same time.”  
  
No. You cannot. If you “admire” a guy like Khan it’s because you sympathize with his desire for control and envy his ability to enslave. What you’re “admiring” in him is the stuff that you wish you could admire in yourself, but can’t because it’s socially unacceptable: selfishness, arrogance, ruthlessness, entitlement. You’re “admiring” in him the masculinity that you believe you would have if you weren’t constantly being made to tame it in order to coexist with women. If only you didn’t have to worry about petty shit like human rights, you are saying as you admire him, I could be this guy too…and wouldn’t that be awesome? I love how everyone seems to assume that masculinity can only degenerate as civilization advances, and that although everything else seems to have gotten better, men are the one thing that used to be better back in the olden days. You know, before equality mattered.  
  
As for the backstory: it’s depressing to see that in 1967:  
  
* They thought it plausible that our last world war would occur in the 1990s.  
* They assumed that this world war would be triggered by an artificially generated glut of superintelligent people.  
* They had absolutely no idea how lowdown and dirty rotten wars would really be during the “strange and violent” periods of late twentieth and twenty-first century history.  
  
It’s funny that in this episode there’s so much focus on physical strength and good looks, since nowadays when people engage in controlled genetics the only thing they care about is intelligence. Seriously. There are sperm banks that charge extra for donors who have PhDs.   
  
In fact, though nobody talks about this, selective breeding is happening every day in this country and the proportion of people who are a product of at least partially ‘controlled genetics’ will undoubtedly increase. When you choose a sperm donor, you have to select for something. Of course, people often select for non-eugenic reasons; many couples, for instance, want the donor to bear some general physical resemblance to the nonbiological parent. But basically, if you’re using donor sperm, you’re reproducing the way those idiot “ambitious scientists” thought everyone should reproduce: by completely separating the question of who you want to love/live with from the question of who you want to be the biological father of your child.   
  
Even if you yourself are staunchly anti-eugenics, the sperm bank itself does a fair amount of screening. Any genetic condition for which they can test, they will exclude. The vast majority of would-be donors don’t work out because only a small percentage of men make sperm that can survive the freezing process. Even for donors whose sperm can take it, the freezing and thawing process kills a significant proportion of the sperm in each sample. The sperm that makes it to the egg, therefore, has got to be one tough sonofabitch. If there’s any relationship between hardiness of sperm and hardiness of offspring, then the lesbians of America are right now raising a generation of superwo/men. Fortunately, however, we will be not be raising them to think of violence as an essential human attribute, so maybe we’ll still avoid the Eugenics Wars.  
  
In fact, I doubt the conflicts we get into over “controlled genetics” will look very much like the Eugenics Wars. For one thing, compared to doing it The Natural Way, genetically engineeered reproduction is astronomically expensive and hideously inefficient. The sci-fi scenario of ordering up an offspring with a specific set of desired traits remains so far in the future one doubts we will ever see it; currently, if you want human offspring, you must use sperm from a pre-existing human being who you did not get to design. And of course there is the basic problem that when human beings decide they can do better than nature, the odds are good that in the long run, whatever improvement they come up with will turn out to have some fatal flaw. You know, like how we come up with better sources of fuel, and then discover that their emissions are cooking the planet and we’re all gonna die.  
  
Speaking of consequences in the long run…  
  
When I heard Kirk pronouncing his decision my initial reaction was, naturally enough,   
  
WHAT are you SMOKING?  
  
You’re going to drop the charges and settle these people on their own planet and just leave them there? And hope for the best? Doesn’t this mean you’re essentially giving Khan exactly what he asked for, minus the subject population and the actual Enterprise? And McGivers goes along? Who knew that your five-year mission involved littering the universe with marooned junior officers? Bailey’s still stuck on Balok’s ship and drinking 3 liters of trania a day now; you left that poor sociologist behind on Beta III dealing with the post-Landru chaos; I think there’s a medical team still out there with Miri; and now McGivers?  
  
Then I thought about it and I said to myself, well really, short of executing them all, what else can Kirk do? These people aren’t going to sit meekly in some bullshit “reorientation center” waiting to be reformed; they’ll be out of that place and trying to rule the planet before the Enterprise has warped out of orbit. Exiling them to an uninhabited planet far away from Earth ensures that it’ll be a while before they can cause any trouble, but it doesn’t (directly) kill them. So it’s not a bad solution, really; the only drawback is that this is twice now that Kirk has dealt with an actual mutiny by dropping all the charges—which you would think would guarantee there’ll be another one real soon.   
  
The problem is that the episode does not make the rational case for doing this. Kirk is shown to be making this decision out of that “sneaking admiration” Scotty talked about. His log entry complains about what a ‘waste’ it would be to send them to this “reorientation center,” and given his starry-eyed romanticizing of “the best of the tyrants” in the briefing room scene, and the fact that he too has read Milton and he too would probably also prefer to rule in hell than to serve in heaven, I think we can assume that Kirk is supposed to be doing this purely because he thinks Khan is too cool for school. Well, he would learn. It is very cold in spaaaaaace.  
  
Next up: A Taste of Armageddon, or as I like to call it, The VERY Cold War.


	22. A TASTE OF ARMAGEDDON

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Since most of the people who follow me on LJ are fans of my [original fiction](http://www.plaidder.com/wof), some of the reviews talk about the relationship between Star Trek and what I usually refer to as WOF (stands for [Women On Fire](http://www.plaidder.com/wof), but has nothing to do with the Christian organization that uses the same name). When you see references to characters with funny-spelled names and books you've never heard of, that's usually why.

**STARDATE: September 20, 2011**

**A TASTE OF ARMAGEDDON**  
 **Written by Robert Hammer and Gene L. Coon from a story by Robert Hammer**  
  
Despite its awful title, I always liked this episode. And still like it, despite…everything.  
  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise is en route to Eminiar 7, a planet known to be inhabited and first contacted by an Earth ship 50 years earlier. They have aboard Ambassador Robert Fox, who is dead set on establishing diplomatic relations with the Eminiarans. As they approach, Eminiar 7 sends out a “7-10” signal, which is apparently Intergalactic Universal Code for “stay the fuck away.” Kirk, uncharacteristically observing that hey, “it’s their planet,” is willing to heed the warning and move on; but Ambassador Fox, of course, demands that they ignore the warning and forge ahead. Kirk, Spock, two male redshirts, and Hot Yeoman 6.0—well, no. Perhaps it is unjust to refer to Yeoman Tamora merely as HY6, since Tamora actually does something useful. At any rate, down they go, to be met by Mea 3, a patrician blonde with a not entirely ridiculous platinum updo and an entirely ridiculous outfit consisting of black matte tights and a strategically draped stripy togalike thing. She conducts them to Anan 7, the goateed aesthete who heads the planetary council. He explains that they’re still at war with Vendicar, another planet in their system and a former colony, and that this has been going on for 500 years. When there is an ‘attack’ on the city, it becomes clear that the war is being fought entirely via computer simulation. One planet launches an attack, the computer does some sort of mathematical calculation, and a list of casualties is generated; the other planet reprises, and so on. It’s just like D &D, except that the virtual ‘casualties’ really die. They are given 24 hours to report to a “disintegration chamber,” where they are atomized out of existence. This allows both planets to conduct a war that kills (on Eminiar, anyway) 3 million people a year without suffering any adverse consequences from a purely material point of view.   
  
Kirk is openly horrified by this; Spock is more quietly horrified, though he does appreciate the “scientific logic” of it. What might have remained a purely philosophical debate turns deadly when Vendicar “destroys” the Enterprise. Now the Enterprise crew has to be liquidated or Eminiar will be in violation of the agreement with Vendicar. Kirk, of course, has no intention of complying. Anan has the whole landing party taken into custody. He then contacts the Enterprise, faking Kirk’s voice, and tries to trick them into sending the entire crew down for “shore leave.” Scotty, who did not just fall off the turnip truck, has the computer confirm that this was a ‘voice duplicator.’ Spock, meanwhile, manages to telepathically convince the guard outside their quarters to open the door and walk in slowly; he is of course jumped and put immediately out of commission, and Kirk and the “Earth party” are loose in the complex. They find Mea 3 on her way to report for disintegration (she was named in the most recent casualty list); they blow up the disintegration station and take Mea back to their quarters figuring it’s the last place anyone will look for them (and that it’s cheaper than building another set). Kirk talks Mea 3 into giving him the layout of the complex.  
  
Meanwhile, Anan 7 has been trying to blow up the Enterprise, but apparently the shields are capable of fending off the worst they can do. Ambassador Fox talks to Anan 7, who of course assures him that the attack on the ship was all a big misunderstanding, and promises to have a nice chat with Fox when he arrives down on the planet. Fox then orders Scotty to drop the shields as a gesture of good faith. Scotty tells Fox where he can stick it. Fox heads down to the planet along with his silent grey-suited personal assistant, where they are of course apprehended and led off for disintegration. Spock, meanwhile, has managed to contact the ship while Kirk is off on a mission; Scotty tells him about Fox, and he and the redshirts (now dressed up as Emeniaran guards) go off to find Kirk and Fox while Yeoman Tamora stays behind to guard Meia 3, thus becoming the first female yeoman to actually handle a weapon.   
  
Kirk has, while all this was going on, snuck into Anan 7’s quarters. A bracing philosophical debate ends with Anan 7 telling Kirk he can find his communicators in the war room. Kirk, who did not just fall off the turnip truck either, realizes it’s a trap and shoves Anan 7 into the corridor ahead of him, thus giving himself time to almost knock down the two guards posted there before they knock him out and drag him down the hall.

  
Spock et al. show up just in time to save Fox from the disintegration chamber. (Fox is shouting the whole time that he is a “special representative” of the “United Federation of Planets,” so at least by this point, the UFP exists, though its relationship to the “United Earth Space Probe Agency” remains unclear.) Fox tells them where Kirk is, since the guards imprudently shared this information. They head off to the council chamber, where Anan 7 is contacting the Enterprise to do some hostage negotiation. As soon as Scotty answers, Kirk yells out, “Scotty! General Order 24! Two hours!” Anan 7 says start beaming down your people or we’ll execute the hostages. Kirk informs him that General Order 24 means “destroy the entire inhabited surface of the planet.” As Anan 7 is distracted by Kirk’s willingness to nuke a whole planet in order to protect 500 people, Kirk disarms the guards, so by the time Spock rides to the rescue with the rest of the “Earth party” Kirk’s already got ‘em covered. Spock and Kirk blow up the entire array of wargame computers. As the smoke clears, Kirk tells an appalled Anan 7 that they have 2 options: 1) Start fighting an actual war with all that entails or 2) call up Vendicar and see if maybe you can end this thing peacefully. Anan 7 remembers that they do in fact have a direct channel to the Vendicar high council, though it hasn’t been used in centuries. (Is it red? I bet it’s red.) Kirk et al. are beamed up—except for Fox, who remains behind to help with the Eminiar/Vendicar negotiations as a ‘neutral’ third party. As they are leaving orbit, Uhura reports that Fox says negotiations are going well. Spock and Kirk chat about the outrageously risky strategy he adopted. Spock says that Kirk “almost make[s] me believe in luck,” to which Kirk replies, “Why Mr. Spock, you almost make me believe in miracles.” **END SUMMARY**  
  
As I said, I’ve always liked this one; and I find it stands up to my adult self still, though of course there are many things wrong with it. A good premise makes up for a lot; and this is a great premise. Practically, there are a lot of reasons why it’s impossible. Losing an extra 3 million people from your planet’s population every year would have an effect on the economy and other things even if there was no physical destruction. But metaphorically and symbolically, it totally works, because it’s based on some depressing but undeniable truths. The main ones are: 1) people can get used to anything; 2) the ‘cleaner’ you can make a war the more willingly your population will put up with it; 3) the economy always matters more to the assholes in charge than human life ever does; 4) by and large, people do what they are told; and 5) once you start a war it’s a lot easier to keep fighting it than to stop it.  
  
There are other beauties, of course. This is a great episode for Scotty, who gets to eat ambassadors for breakfast just like a honey badger, and who also gets to utter the words, “Aye, the haggis is in the fire.” It also includes the Season One winner of the Funniest Use of the Vulcan Nerve Pinch contest (“Sir, there is a multilegged creature crawling on your shoulder”) and the first female guest star since Dr. Dehner who hasn’t annoyed the shit out of me.  Mea 3 is what they call a “cool blonde”; if they’d had the money they would no doubt have tried to hire Grace Kelly but of course instead they have Barbara Babcock (also, IMDB tells me, the voice of Trelayne’s mom), who carries off the role with an icy hauteur which nearly succeeds in keeping Kirk at arm’s length. (Kirk apparently cannot talk to a woman for any length of time without grabbing her by the shoulders. But at least he doesn’t kiss her.) The look she gives after Spock instructs Tamora to “knock her down and sit on her if you must” in order to prevent Mea 3 from “immolating herself” is priceless. Mea, like Anan, has a highly developed sense of what is “moral,” which is impressive except for the giant big hole in the middle where 3 million people dying every year for no discernible reason is ‘honorable.’  
  
But really, it all comes back to the idea of conducting a war which exacts a huge toll in human life but allows the survivors to carry on with business as usual. In 1967, of course, the obvious referent was the Cold War, in which everyone knew that someone could at any moment “push the button,” but had to pretend that this was normal. When I was watching the show for the first time as a teenager, there was some talk of developing a “neutron bomb” which would kill people but leave buildings and infrastructure intact. The thing that drove me crazy about the first Gulf War back in 1991 was precisely the fact that from the point of view of Americans, it was all fought by computers—the footage they showed of the ‘smart bombs’ made the whole thing look like a @#$! video game) and, because the odds were so skewed, nearly painless in terms of casualties (though Gulf War Syndrome continues to unfold) and extremely sanitized when it came to media coverage. And of course now, we are all highly skilled in the art of ignoring the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are dying in a war or wars that our country is waging. We ourselves are not required to die. But we are required to accept as normal the fact that ‘defense’ eats up a huge amount of our tax money and renders things like health care, a working public education system, and social security luxuries that we can’t “afford.” Our lives are safe, but at least for those in the middle and at the bottom, our economy is a casualty. And I do wonder how far Americans would take this post-9/11 fetish for security. Could our government get people to voluntarily immolate themselves if it was going to make the country ‘safer’? Don’t answer, I don’t want to know.  
  
After Vietnam, they went to work cleaning war up for us. We don’t have to see the carnage if we don’t want to; indeed, if you do want to, you have to look outside the US media. We don’t hemhorrage “American lives” the way we did in WWII and during the Vietnam War. And the result is that it we live with war. We let it go on. And on. And fucking on.  
  
So, rather unusually, some of my favorite parts of this episode involve Captain Kirk. When Anan 7 starts picturing for Kirk all the horrors that he is unleashing on the planet by forcing them into a ‘hot’ war, Kirk basically says yeah, my point. When Anan 7 justifies the permanent war on the grounds that they have “accepted” that they are instinctive killers “like you” and that war is an inevitable part of their culture, Kirk comes back with a little speech which must have made a significant impression on the young me, because I remembered most of it. You can acknowledge that we’ve got a barbaric streak, Kirk says, and still prevent war. All it takes is to wake up in the morning and say, OK, we’re killers, but we’re not going to kill today. It’s a very 12-steppy idea, which sort of makes sense given the way war is usually understood in the Star Trekiverse—which is to say as an irrepressible and essential urge which is always looking for opportunities to make our lives miserable. And it’s a more realistic and persuasive restatement of Star Trek’s idealism: no, we’re not cut out for paradise, but we don’t have to live in hell either. We’re not perfect but that doesn’t mean we can’t be better.  
  
At the end of [Redemption](http://www.plaidder.com/wof), Conn tells Gill a story about what it was like in Ideire after the civil war ended and how they managed to avoid continuing the cycle of reprisal. “We’re no better than you are, Gill,” he says. “We just try harder.” And you can hear Kirk’s speech kind of echoing in there, of course without all the Shatnerie.   
  
Of course, that speech, and Kirk’s entire strategy, is predicated on the idea that most people—even politicians—are appalled and terrified by the horrors of a ‘hot’ war, and will make war only as long as they are insulated from its ugliest consequences. As usual, the ‘war’ with Vendicar (whose name appears to derive from the Italian word for vengeance) is strangely contentless; it goes on because it has always gone on, not because either party has an economic or territorial stake in the outcome. Kirk assumes that when given a way out, the leaders on both planets will be sensible enough to take it. In the future, I guess, world leaders will not be cynical enough to knowingly perpetuate a war for purely selfish, economic, or world-dominance-related reasons.  
  
There is, by the way, absolutely no talk of the prime directive. This could be a continuity issue, or it could reflect the fact that as a technologically advanced society on par or above Earth, they are exempted.  
  
The elephant in the ointment, as it were, is of course the infamous General Order 24. [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) asked me, after Kirk explains GO24 to Anan 7, “So what does General Order 24 mean _really_?” She refused to believe that this was not a ruse and that in fact, Kirk did just tell Scotty to torch the _entire planet_. After the episode was over we had quite the discussion about this. First of all, I find it hard to believe either that starship captains have the authority to order the destruction of an entire planet (since Kirk’s orders are to establish diplomatic relations with said planet ‘at all costs,’ which will be difficult once he’s vaporized its entire inhabited surface), or that the Enterprise is actually capable of destroying a planet’s entire inhabited surface. If Coon and Hammer intended us to believe that General Order 24 actually exists, it can only be a symptom of a common problem with Star Trek writing, which is a serious warping of scale. Most Star Trek “planets” contain only one culture and one government; in many episodes, for all intents and purposes, a “planet” might as well be a single city or indeed a single building. Having already gotten into the habit of treating a city like a planet, Coon and/or Hammer might have just failed to comprehend the enormity of the crime Kirk is contemplating. One would like to hope, since Scotty has already shown himself capable of insubordination, that he would not have actually carried out the order. But one does not know.  
  
One might also look at this as another example of  _Day The Earth Stood Still_ Syndrome, which reflects the fact that the writers cannot imagine violence being eradicated through anything other than a threat of even greater violence. The Metrons have already used this plot in “Arena,” and it would fit in with the episode’s representation of the criminally obnoxious Ambassador Fox, whose faith in “diplomacy” is repeatedly held up for ridicule. As Scotty says, “The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.” Even Spock tells Fox that the “usual methods of diplomacy are ineffective here” and describes his destruction of the disintegration chamber as “a peculiar form of diplomacy.” Fox’s talents are useful—but only after the soldiers have compelled the enemy to surrender.   
  
Or, as we more or less wound up agreeing, you could decide that “General Order 24” actually reads, “Pretend that you are going to blow up the entire planet.” In other words, one could assume that a) Kirk is bluffing b) Scotty knows he’s bluffing and c) “General Order 24” is itself an institutionalized bluff put into the regulations because it’s so handy when it comes to getting landing parties out of jams like this.   
  
Up next: Honey badger in love! Snif!


	23. THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spock finds love through the miracle of xenobiology. Fascinating.
> 
> Also, the "PJ" I refer to below is my daughter. Stands for "Plaidder Junior."

**STARDATE: September 29, 2011**

**THIS SIDE OF PARADISE**  
 **Written by D. C. Fontana from a story by Jerry Sohl (writing as Nathan Butler) and D. C. Fontana**  
  
It’s hard to be a honey badger in love.  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise heads to Omicron Ceti III to investigate what they expect to be the decimated remains of an Earth colony started there three years ago. The planet, as they know, is being bombarded by sinister and deadly “Bertolt Rays” (in the future, Brecht’s departed spirit will roam the cosmos radiating a cynicism so powerful and insidious that it destroys all living animal tissue). Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, and two junior officers with some relationship to biology beam down expecting to find ruins and corpses. They are startled to discover the colonists alive and in perfect health. Spock is extra-startled to discover that one of the colonists is a blonde bombshell named Leila who had a major crush on him six years previously and doesn’t seem to have gotten over it, despite being as serene and content as all the other colonists. While McCoy tries to figure out why everyone isn’t dead, Leila takes Spock for a walk and introduces him to a stand of mutant day-lilies which fire a burst of spores at him. Initially, Spock is overcome by pain, which puzzles Leila sorely; but soon he discovers that he’s no longer in pain, he’s just as serene as all the colonists are, and in fact, he’s in love with Leila. Not only that, but frolicking with Leila is way more fun than following orders; so when Kirk, annoyed by the colony leader (Elias Sandoval)’s refusal to cooperate with the evacuation he’s been ordered to carry out, contacts Spock looking for a little help, Spock blows him off in a very un-Spocklike way. The exasperated Kirk finally discovers Spock hanging upside down from a tree branch (actually, it’s a horizontal beam clearly placed expressly for this purpose by the set dressers, but anyway) and laughing his ass off. When Kirk’s snapping at him fails to produce any effect, he orders Sulu to arrest Spock, which works all right until the spores explode all over Sulu and the other dude and Kirk—inexplicably immune to the spore effect—is all of a sudden the only guy on the planet who cares about petty shit like orders from Starfleet command.  
  
By now the spores have gotten to McCoy, who under their influence has developed a hideous “Southern” accent and beamed up a whole load of these Lilies of Lollygagging to the Enterprise. When Kirk gets back to the ship, a serene and smiling Uhura informs him that she’s shorted out all the communications except for ship to shore. The spores have gotten into the air vents and infected the entire crew; and, Kirk’s frothings notwithstanding, they beam themselves down to the planet for permanent shore leave. Marooned alone on the bridge, Kirk unburdens himself despondently to his captain’s log until a Lily of Lollygagging, sensing a moment of weakness, sneaks up and spores him. This time it works. Kirk contacts a very pleased Spock to tell him he “belongs” now and he’ll be heading down to the planet surface as soon as he packs a few things. I note that one of the few things he felt he couldn’t do without in his new life as a lazy hedonist was the “wonderous wrap,” complete with sparkly trim, which he packs in his little overnight bag before taking his medals out of his special Jumbo Capacity Medal Safe and fondling them briefly.  
  
Down at the transporter room, Kirk is all set to beam himself over when he is suddenly seized by some kind of stomach virus that causes him to hurl—no, wait, that’s emotion being dredged up from the depths of his outraged soul. Turning on some sort of blue light that makes him look extra-crazy, Kirk screams, “No! I can’t leave!” and discovers that his rage at being forced to part from his demon ship/lover (or is it rage at being UNABLE to part from her?) has magically deactivated the spores. He immediately plots the recovery of his crew, pausing to dramatically inform his captain’s log that he may not survive this plan because Spock’s so much stronger than a human and he might be capable of tearing Kirk limb from limb once he’s “roused.”  
Kirk inveigles Spock up to the transporter room and immediately starts insulting him. The previously serene Spock turns into the Incredible Hulk and starts throwing Kirk around the transporter room. Just as he is about to brain Kirk with a walker of some kind, Spock realizes what’s happened and backs off. The two of them figure out that they can replicate this effect on the planet by broadcasting a really irritating sonic frequency that will make everyone pissed off. Before they do this, Leila beams up; Spock meets her in the transporter room, where the discovery that Spock is back to his old self is painful enough to shut off the spore effect. Kirk and Spock set up their irritate-o-ray; fights break out; in the midst of pummeling McCoy Sandoval suddenly realizes that he’s wasted the past three years on this happiness bullshit. He agrees to evacuate the colonists; the crew sheepishly return to the Enterprise. After delivering a bracing speech about mankind’s need for struggle and striving, Kirk asks Spock to comment on his own experience of Omicron Ceti III. Spock observes that he doesn’t have much to say except that it was the first time in his life that he was happy.  **END SUMMARY**

  
LEILA! YOU GOT ME ON MY KNEES! LEIIIIILAAAA!!! I’M BEGGIN’ DARLIN’ PLEASE! LEI—  
  
What? Are we on? Oh. Sorry. Ahem.  
  
Well, this one was preserved pretty well in my memory. I especially remember the scene of Spock in the tree. When I was younger, I’m sure, I was disturbed by the complete transformation of his character under the influence of something that Spock himself describes, just before he gets spored, as a “happiness pill.” My horror of mind-altering chemicals was even more intense in my youth—I walked out of the film _Hair_ at the age of ten during the LSD sequence—and though all the actors seem to have taken different approaches to playing “serene and happy,” many of them just seem stoned (Sulu and Uhura in particular). But even then, I couldn’t help but feel for Spore Spock. Apart from being rude to Kirk—which doesn’t even begin to correct the rudeness imbalance in that relationship—Spore Spock doesn’t seem obviously antisocial or intoxicated; he just cares more about being in love than he does about anything else. Though the mature me is somewhat frustrated with the writing for Spock’s love scenes (pretty clouds and rainbows? really?) and with Jill Ireland’s ‘acting,’ the sad story of the short and doomed life of Spock’s first love is still affecting.  
  
What I did not notice the first time, but which was very interesting to me this time, was how specifically and viciously racist Kirk is while he’s trying to ‘cure’ Spock. As I’ve said before and will no doubt say again, all the interesting stuff about race in Star Trek is worked out through Spock. If you look at how Kirk chooses to make Spock mad, it is clear that the model is good old-fashioned American race-baiting. The content has to be different because Spock’s Vulcan and not Black, but all the rhetorical moves are there. Kirk insults Spock’s parents, represents his birth as the result of an unnatural miscegenation, traduces the whole Vulcan “subhuman race,” grotesquely mocks Spock’s ‘different’ physical features, denies him human consciousness or a soul, and attacks him for having “the gall to make love to that girl.”  He doesn’t say “white girl” but you don’t need supersensitive Vulcan ears to hear it in there. What pushes Spock over the edge is Kirk calling him not only a freak but an animal: “You should be in the circus, right next to the dog-faced boy.” And let’s not forget that Kirk’s delivering all of this while holding a heavy metal cylinder and playing with it like it’s a baseball bat.  
  
So, while down on Omicron Ceti III McCoy has morphed into a lovably decadent Southern gentleman, up on the Enterprise Kirk has released his inner Klansman. Strange things, these spores.  
  
I would like to give some props to Leonard Nimoy for this scene. Without eating any scenery, Nimoy makes Spock’s experience of Kirk’s taunting deeply painful both for himself and the viewers. At one moment, after Kirk insults his parents, Spock says very simply, “My father was an ambassador; my mother, a teacher.” And without doing very much, Nimoy makes you feel how desperately he is defending his dignity—and suggests that though he hasn’t let us see it before, this is how Spock usually feels on the many occasions when he has to defend his ‘humanity’ and his mixed descent to yet another jackass. After Spock breaks off the attack, he says, “You did that to me deliberately.” The way Nimoy delivers that line, it’s clear that knowing that Kirk was being strategically rather than sincerely racist does not make it better and perhaps makes it worse. It’s not so much “Oh, now I see what you’re doing” as “I cannot believe you just did that.” Knowing that it was a ruse does not erase the pain of having been subjected to all that ugliness from one of his two real friends. Kirk, characteristically, doesn’t pick up on this at all. He seems to think that since Spock knows he didn’t really mean it, and since Spock got the chance to “belt his captain…several times,” it should all be OK now: “Believe me, it was painful for me—in more ways than one.” Kirk explains his actions, but he never apologizes. Interestingly, Spock never apologizes for beating Kirk up either. The closest he gets is pointing out that hitting a “fellow officer” is a “court-martial offense,” to which Kirk replies, “Well, if we’re both in the brig, who’s going to build the [irritate-o-ray device]?”  
  
But who knows. Maybe this is just how men bond: first the hideous verbal abuse, then the violence, and then apparently you’re so close that one of you will turn his back on love and happiness just for the sake of the other. When Leila tries to talk Spock into coming back for another dose of happy spores, Spock refuses, citing his “responsibilities to this ship…to that man on the bridge.” And it is true that if you ever wondered how K/S ever got started, this episode can explain much. “Amok Time,” which is coming up soon, will explain the rest.  
  
This brings us to the most interesting aspect of the premise, which is the idea that human beings (I’m sorry, “men”) are not cut out for happiness. As [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) pointed out, usually the problem with an apparently utopian culture is that it has some sort of seamy dark underbelly which, once you know about it, cannot be tolerated. (“Return of the Archons,” for instance.) But there’s nothing obviously wrong with the Omicron Ceti III colony, as long as you can get past the part about everyone being on drugs. People don’t seem to be doing horrible things to each other when the lights are out; there’s no apparent conflict; most everyone seems content with their lot; everyone’s material needs are being met, and so on. And these drugs don’t destroy anyone’s bodies—in fact, these drugs confer perfect health and—it would seem—practical immortality. It’s the perfect commune—and thanks to the spores, there isn’t even any of that messy interpersonal shit that breaks up so many American experiments in collective living. Their only apparent motivation for going back to the ship once the spores are deactivated instead of sticking around for another dose of happy dust is the one suggested by Kirk in his little rhetorical vent about how “man stagnates without a challenge” and his final lyrical description about how we just weren’t meant to “stroll to the music of the lute.” Sandoval puts it more prosaically: his first comment after coming to his senses is, “We’ve done nothing here.” His lament about how “we were going to make this place a garden” would seem on the face of it to make no sense: it is a garden. In fact, as Spore Spock says, it’s Eden. But it fits in with something one of the junior botanists says about how for an “agricultural colony” they have “very little acreage planted.” They have enough to support the colony, he says, but no more. And you’re thinking, what the hell more do they need? But of course! What was I thinking? I forgot about CAPITALISM! The point isn’t to coax out of the planet what you need to live and then enjoy life; the point is to do the maximum amount of work to produce the maximum amount of product because this achieves…something.  
  
So I have to say, I listen to Kirk’s rhetoric and I think, you arrogant capitalist bastard. Maybe YOU need to be part of all this striving and producing and building and selling and profiting. At this instant, I have to tell you, frolicking in the trees all day with my best girlie by my side sounds pretty good to me. You give me enough food, adequate shelter, and a supply of commodious green jumpsuits, and I think I could get used to stagnating without a challenge.  
  
Except…oh wait. Who’s gonna take care of PJ?  
  
Aha! THAT’S the dark secret!  
  
This expedition was supposed to have “men, women, and children.” Well, we see men, and we see one woman (Leila). The other colonists are supposedly dispersed into other settlements which we never see (presumably this is to explain why there are not 100 extras strolling about in the background). Still, it is suspicious that there is not a single child in this colony, what with everyone being in perfect health all the time. And let me tell you—you introduce one infant into that mix, and that’s the end of serenity. I don’t think all the spores in the world would enable anyone to either give birth to a child or parent for any length of time without feeling strong emotions (positive and negative). Since the spores are the only thing protecting people from the Bertolt rays, I think we can now explain the lack of children. All new parents lose the spore protection soon after the infant’s birth, thus becoming vulnerable to Bertolt rays and perishing in a matter of weeks. The newborn infants, of course, are feeling nothing but strong emotions all the time, so they would be goners as well. By this point, no doubt, everyone has decided to use a combination of contraception and celibacy to prevent these unfortunate occurrences, which might explain why despite being apparently the only woman in this colony Leila is apparently still single and unattached when Spock shows up.  
  
I’m joking, of course. But upon mature reflection, I’m not sure that Kirk may not be right, though for different reasons than he imagines. After my cancer I went through a long period of feeling like I could not find a purpose worthy of the life that had been spared to me. Of course there were [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/)**lizaetal** and PJ. But as far as the rest of my time went—I felt this need to make every moment count, and it frustrated the crap out of me that I had to burn so much of it at work when I should be doing…SOMETHING else.  
   
 It is something I still think about. Should I give up working and dedicate the little time I have left on this planet to…something? Should I spend it all with the two people who love me most, who have the most invested in me and my life, where I can give the most love and comfort and joy? Should I devote myself full-time to the various creative things I do which make no money but which occasionally produce something unique and capable of bringing some pleasure to some people sometimes? Should I go do something heroically altruistic that would make life better for other human beings in need? What’s the best way to make my life matter?  
  
Or I could get addicted to some stupid Facebook game and pass the time that way.  
  
But I think that no matter what happened, I would end up with work. It might be different work; it might be unpaid work; but it’d be work. I could do Omicron Ceti III for, maybe, six months. But after that I would be itching to make something or do something or help something happen. Because if what you want is to make the present moment matter, well, unless you really have a gift for contemplation, it does matter more when you’re working at something.  
   
   
Ah well. See, this is what makes Star Trek matter to me—it is cheesy and crazy and wrong in so many ways, but it does raise the big questions.


	24. DEVIL IN THE DARK

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When I make the argument that something is lost in the reboot, this is one of the episodes that comes to mind. "Devil in the Dark" introduces ST:TOS's first non-humanoid alien (apart from incorporeal energy beings), and yeah, it looks cheesy. But that doesn't stop this from being a great episode--and the kind of episode that you could never make if you were concerned about making people wait more than sixty seconds between action sequences. All props to Nimoy for making this episode what it was. And to Gene L. Coon, who was just much better at thinking up creative aliens and much more interested in the nuances of human-alien interaction than many of the other writers.

**STARDATE: October 5, 2011**

**THE DEVIL IN THE DARK**  
 **Written by Gene L. Coon**  
  
Or, as I like to call it, “Grendel Rides Again.”  
  
  
 **The Summary:** Unusually, the episode opens far from the bridge of the Enterprise, in the bowels of a mining colony on Planet Icantbebothered. After opening up new levels of tunnels, the mining operation has been bedeviled by some unknown monster who strikes without warning and can burn its victims “to a crisp” within seconds. A terrified guard named Schmitter relieves the previous guard; he is attacked and crisped by the monster before the rest of the guards have even left the area. The Enterprise is called in to help find the monster and destroy it before the shortages of “pergium” and the other vital minerals extracted from this planet spell doom for the colonies dependent on them. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down along with quite a few redshirts and a lot of Phaser Twos (it has been established, with some pains, over the past few episodes that the smaller handheld phasers that look like keyless entry remotes are Phaser One and the bigger, blaster-like phasers are Phaser Two and that One is more convenient but Two packs a much bigger wallop). The reports about the monster contradict what the Enterprise sensors have to say about the existence of life on this planet; according to them, there’s humans and rocks and that’s it. Spock speculates as to the possible existence of a non-carbon-based life form; McCoy laughs at him. McCoy’s contribution is to report that the monster’s victims are not ‘burned,’ but rather torched by some extremely corrosive acid. During the first conference in the mine boss’s office Spock notices a large, smooth, round silicone nodule; the mining boss says there are thousands of them everywhere. Kirk asks Spock to tell him what he thinks these nodules are, but Spock says he doesn’t want McCoy to laugh at him any more so he’ll keep it to himself for now.  
  
While they confer, the lights start flashing. Turns out the monster has gotten into the main reactor chamber (the one powering the life support systems) and stolen the main cooling pump. Kirk gets Scott down to try to rig up some stopgap solution while they now all have to search extra-urgently for the missing pump. Spock, who has come to believe that the monster is the last individual of a nearly extinct species, expresses a desire to capture the creature instead of killing it; honey badger gets overruled. The creature attacks in Spock and Kirk’s presence; they nail it with their phasers and manage to split off a piece of its armored shell. So, great, now the thing is wounded and extra-savage. As the hunt goes on and the miners get uglier and uglier, Kirk wanders down a tunnel and comes face to face with the monster—which resembles nothing so much as a very large piece of cheese pizza thrown onto a fringed rug. The monster is now scared of the phaser, so Kirk is able to achieve a standoff. While he waits for Spock to show up, Kirk tries talking to the monster. When Kirk expresses a wish to be able to gain its trust, Spock suggests mind-melding with it. Spock’s initial attempt produces mainly howls of “PAAAAAAAAAAIN!!!!,” though Spock is able to report that the creature calls itself a Horta. The Horta, meanwhile, has acquired a crude knowledge of English grammar, and burns the words “NO KILL I” into the rock. While he and Spock ponder the syntactical ambiguities of this message, Kirk calls in McCoy to heal the horta. When McCoy shows up, Spock is already doing an even closer mind-meld with the creature in hopes of finding out what drove it to murder. The horta, ventriloquized by Spock, vents its rage at the “murderers” who have destroyed something important and cryptically laments the “end of things.” It also tells Kirk where the coolant pump for the reactor is—it’s in the “vault of tomorrow.” Kirk heads for the vault while McCoy gets to work on the horta’s wound. In the vault he finds, along with the coolant pump, many many silicone nodules, many of them broken. He comes back out and confirms with Spock that these nodules are, in fact, the horta’s eggs.  
  
At this point, the miners bust in, demanding to clobber the horta. Kirk defends the horta, explaining that the miners have killed “thousands of her children” and that she was just doing what any mother would do to protect her young. Spock explains that once every 50,000 years, all the horta die off except for one, who watches over the eggs until they hatch and then raises the new generation of horta. Kirk suggests that the miners—who are now all very chagrined—could work out an agreement with the horta, who are able to tunnel through solid rock as if it were air and who could, therefore, be most helpful to their mining work and make them all rich. McCoy jubilantly reports that the horta will recover; he’s fixed the wound by applying concrete to it. Spock agrees to meld with the horta so that negotiations can begin.  
  
Back on the Enterprise, Kirk checks in with the mining boss, who reports that the eggs are hatching, the horta are tunneling all over, and they have already found untold mineral riches. He concludes that “the horta aren’t so bad once you get used to their appearance.” Spock mentions that the horta had said the same thing about humanoid appearance. Goaded on by McCoy, Spock mentions that the horta found his Vulcan ears the most attractive human feature and he hadn’t had the heart to tell her that only he had them. This hilarious ribfest finally ends when Kirk tells Spock that he’s becoming “more human every day,” at which point honey badger says, “Captain, I see no reason to stand here and be insulted,” and walks away.  **END SUMMARY**

  
I really like this episode, and not just because it reminds me so much of Beowulf. Apart from the Gorn, which looks humanoid enough except for being green and scaly, this the first alien being the crew has had to interact with that doesn’t present, at least initially, as humanoid. Yes, it looks ridiculous. Yes, you can tell that there’s an actor or stagehand or some other poor sap hiding under the horta’s ‘armor’ making the thing scuttle back and forth. Yes, it does look like a big piece of cheese pizza. But you know what? It doesn’t matter. In the absence of decent special effects, Shatner and Nimoy have to make this thing real the old-fashioned way: by pretending that it is. In other words, acting.  And both of them do well, in their different ways. Kirk, who up to this point has been out for blood, somehow decides not to shoot to kill when the horta appears to him; Spock, who up to this point has been against killing the creature, hears that the thing is “about ten feet away” from Kirk and immediately starts begging Kirk to kill it. Faced with the challenge of accounting for Kirk’s about-face (Spock’s can, of course, be accounted for by honey badger’s tender feelings for That Man On The Bridge), Shatner suggests that Kirk is genuinely intrigued by the horta’s alienness. As long as he can hold it at bay with his phaser, he’s more curious than afraid; and once stalemate is achieved, he sits down and starts talking to it much more easily and naturally than he ever talked to his captain’s log. I find that whole sequence very appealing, because for once we see Kirk responding to a new and potentially dangerous situation with the kind of curiosity and openness to the unknown that you would expect from a guy who wants to spend five years exploring strange new worlds. By the time Spock shows up, Kirk seems to have become attached to the horta. Neither Spock nor McCoy seems sanguine about Kirk’s idea of treating the horta’s wound; but to McCoy’s “I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer,” he replies, “You’re a healer, there’s a patient, that’s an order.” And McCoy rises to the occasion.  
  
Everybody rises to the occasion in this episode. That’s probably why I like it. Spock certainly puts himself at extreme risk for the sake of contacting the thing; and here, again, I have to give it to Nimoy for the performance. He makes the horta’s lament for its children so weirdly compelling that you forget that he’s palpating a lump of melted cheese; and when Kirk finds those broken eggs, it hurts him just like it hurts you.  Even the miners are genuinely concerned when they discover that they’ve been destroying the creature’s eggs, and instead of responding the way today’s corporate exploiters would—viz., “Great, let’s crush the rest and extinguish the species”—they imply that had they only known, they wouldn’t have encroached.  
  
I would be remiss if I did not note that the shift in attitude seems to be closely linked to their discovery of the horta’s supposed gender. The horta has been an “it” all the way until Spock identifies the horta as the new generation’s “mother.” In fact, we don’t know whether this species is sexually dimorphic or not, since the script is unclear about how these eggs were generated; and it’s also possible that this particular horta did not lay these eggs. Spock says that when they hatch, “she is the mother to them,” which leaves it up in the air whether this particular horta is the biological or adoptive mother of the new generation. Nevertheless, post-mindmeld, Spock refers to the horta as “she” and so does Kirk; and for whatever reason, once the horta becomes a mother, her violence is naturalized and no longer treated as evidence of a savage, animal, monstrous nature. Once they find out that mother horta was just protecting her eggs, she’s not terrifying any more.  
  
(Shows what they know. Fuck with Grendel, OK...but DON'T fuck with GRENDEL'S MOM!)  
  
So, as in “The Corbomite Maneuver,” the reduction of the Big Scary Monster to something for which humans have a frame of reference allows everyone to work out a means of peaceful coexistence which might even be mutually beneficial. Hooray!  
  
Alas, though it pains me to say it, I have serious misgivings about the long-term staying power of the solution that Kirk and Spock broker.  Sure, it’s all right for now, when the miners are getting rich and the horta have all the rock that they could want to eat. But the planet is finite, and so are its mineral deposits. What’s going to happen when the horta and the miners start competing for diminishing resources? Unless the horta shit pergium—and come to think of it, nobody ever does raise the question of what a horta dropping would be like—their need for food is going to wind up coming into conflict with the miners’ desire for profit at some point.  
  
It is my crackpot theory that one of the reasons America is so fucked up about environmental issues is that, because of our colonial history, we still see the continent as infinite and inexhaustible. Imagine what it was like for the first European colonists: LOOK! It’s an EXTRA CONTINENT we never knew was here! And it goes on FOREVER! We’re NEVER gonna run out of THIS stuff!   
  
Even before we get there, there is the question of the horta’s status in the mining operation. Kirk says on his way out that “once mother horta starts telling [the kids] where to look, you people are going to be embarrassingly rich.” Oh…so they’re going to be telling the horta where to tunnel? Doesn’t that make the horta labor? And aren’t they going to be unpaid, except for room and board? So won’t that basically be…slavery?  
  
And here is where we run up against the limits of the show’s idealism. The horta is clearly a sentient being; it uses language and can plot and carry out complex acts of sabotage and Spock even indicates that its mind is more ‘highly organized’ than a human’s. Nevertheless, because it is not humanoid, the episode does not give the horta the status a sentient being should have. The resolution treats the horta the way we treat the more intelligent animals: they’ll be trained to use their instinctive behaviors for the benefit of humans, and as long as they’re well fed and happy it’s fine that they’re working for the miners’ profit and not being paid or compensated in any way apart from not being killed. If we were capable of really seeing that cheese pizza as human—or at least human-equivalent—that’d bother us a shitload more than it does.  
  
Anyway. I think I am noticing a trend here, which is that  Gene L. Coon seems to be responsible for raising the bar in terms of the writing. Coon is credited on “Arena,” “Space Seed,” “A Taste of Armageddon,” and now this one; and all of them seem to me to be notably stronger than most other first-season episodes. Fontana apparently had a talent for spinning gold from crap (apparently that’s what happened with “This Side of Paradise”) but when given the chance to write her own script, coughed up “Tomorrow is Yesterday.” Coon goes on to produce “Errand of Mercy,” of which more anon, and…oh, wait. I see he is also credited as the writer on “Spock’s Brain.”  
  
Never mind.  
  
Up next: Old-school Klingons!


	25. ERRAND OF MERCY

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here come the Klingons!

**STARDATE: October 9, 2011**

**ERRAND OF MERCY**  
 **Written by Gene L. Coon**  
  
In which we are introduced to the Klingons, and Kirk embarrasses himself. I mean more than usual.  
  
 **The Summary** : The Federation is on the verge of war with the Klingon empire. The Enterprise has been sent to a planet called Organia which the Federation thinks the Klingons are planning to invade in order to turn it into a military base. Their mission is to ‘help’ the Organians defend themselves against the Klingons and thus avoid being occupied and becoming a Klingon military base (and become a Federation military base instead oh no of course not how could I be so cynical never mind). A Klingon ship appears and attacks the Enteprise; the Enterprise returns fire and blows it up. (This is, incidentally, only the second time we have seen the Enterprise successfully and deliberately destroy another ship; the first was the destruction of the Romulan bird of prey in “Balance of Terror.”) Figuring war is now inevitable, Kirk and Spock go down to Organia to try to talk them into becoming a Federation base from which to fight a proxy war oh no no no how could I suggest such a thing bad summarizer no biscuit. As I say, they go down to Organia to try to talk them into letting the Enterprise help defend their freedoms and improve their living conditions, asking nothing in return but the joy of being allowed to help them.  
  
Their advance information on Organia is that Organia is a technologically primitive society progressing toward industrialization. When they materialize in a market square, Kirk and Spock do see quite a bit of evidence that they are in a Generic Preindustrial Agri-Pastoral Sort Of Medieval Setting—people leading livestock to market, animal-drawn vehicles, colorful tunics and leggings, and so on. A caftan-clad gray-haired elder named Aylebourne approaches them and bids them welcome. He leads them to the council chamber, where Kirk makes his pitch. Kirk grows ever more frustrated by the Organians’ insistence that they themselves are in no danger, that they thank him for his concern but they don’t need protection, and that Kirk and Spock ought to leave the planet soon since they’re the ones who are really in jeopardy. While Kirk fumes, the Klingons beam down a few hundred guys and the occupation begins. Since one of the elders on the council is apparently clairvoyant, they have enough warning to give Kirk and Spock some clothes in hopes of passing them off as Organians. OK, one Organian and a “Vulcan trader.”  
  
But when Klingon Commander Kur marches in—swarthy skin, moustaches, crazy eyebrows and all—a yellow caftan, brown leggings, and furry boots cannot hide from Kur’s keen eyes the fact that this red-headed guy with the square jaw who says his name is “Barona” sure seems to hate him some Klingons. Kur, who holds the Organians and their serene passivity in utter contempt, appoints Kirk, excuse me, “Barona” as the liaison between the occupation and the Organian people. Spock is worked over by some Klingon goons with a “mind-sifter,” a device which reads minds and destroys them in the process. Guess what, goons? Honey badger don’t give a shit. Vulcan mental discipline enables Spock not only to save his mind but to preserve his cover—which is more than one can say for Kirk, who can’t even get shoved out of the way by a passing Klingon without displaying extremely un-Organian aggression.   
  
Appalled by the Organians’ acceptance of Klingon rule, Kirk and Spock decide that someone needs to demonstrate to the Organians that it is possible to resist. They do this by blowing up a Klingon munitions dump in the dead of night. When called on the carpet by the Organian council, Kirk admits to having blown it up and tries to inspire the council to rebellion. Sadly, the Council chamber has been bugged, so Kur shows up with his goons. When Kur threatens to open up a can of mind-sifter on the entirely mentally undisciplined Kirk, Aylebourne tells Kur who Kirk really is. Kur is delighted, and hauls Kirk and Spock back to headquarters. After trying to interrogate Kirk, Kur tells him that he’s got 12 hours to decide to talk or else a) they’ll mind-sift Kirk till his brain is sludge and b) they’ll kill and dissect Spock. Then, being a tactical genius well-used to the ways and means of controlling political dissidents, Kur puts Kirk and Spock in the same cell. As they are pondering their options, the door of the cell magically opens and there’s Aylebourne, who doesn’t want the Klingons to have the chance to do violence to their captives. He takes them back to the council chamber, where Kirk and Spock talk Aylebourne into giving back their phasers and communicators.  
  
They sneak into the command center and attack Kur in his office. Other Klingons show up. While a brawl takes place on the ground, the Enterprise and other starships are squaring off for battle with a Klingon fleet. Except that all of a sudden, everyone’s weapons turn red hot and drop to the ground, and physical combat becomes mysteriously impossible, and up on the Enterprise all the controls get too hot to handle and the same happens with the Klingon ships. The Organians explain that they are preventing the Klingons and Federation from fighting a war, because the Organians can’t be having this violence bullshit. Kirk then rips the Organians a new one for presuming to interfere with his right to wage war; Kur is right in there with him. The Organians say tough shit. Eventually Kur and Kirk accept that war between their empires will not take place at this time. The Organians reveal themselves as bright glowing energy beings, then disappear. Spock theorizes that their humanoid forms, like all the crap on their planet, are “conventionalizations” preserved for the benefit of visitors; the Organians themselves, having evolved beyond corporeal form, no longer need any of it—and of course would not be affected by any kind of occupation, since they are now both incorporeal and immortal.   
  
Back on the Enterprise, Spock finally gets to be the one to ask Kirk why he’s so quiet lately. Kirk admits that he is embarrassed at himself for having been “furious with the Organians for stopping a war I didn’t want.” Spock says there there, it must have taken them millions of years to get to that point, and after all we did beat the odds. Kirk says, “No we didn’t, the Organians raided the game,” and we’re off to the next star system.  **END SUMMARY**

  
This was a mixed bag for me. The whole episode, in a way, is a joke on Kirk; and though I enjoyed the punch line, the setup is excruciating. Not only does Kirk act like an ass throughout, but Spock buys into it all in a way that is seriously out of character. This is the guy who argued against killing the horta, who risked an uprising by trying to value MOMIS life in “Galileo Seven,” and who called the whole assembly of senior officers on their bullshit when they were romanticizing Khan. And yet, when Kirk says hey, let’s commit an act of sabotage that is 100% guaranteed to provoke the Klingon occupying force into killing several hundred Organians, Spock says sure. I mean I know they’re on a mission. But Spock is normally a lot less cavalier about danger to sentient life, and you would expect him to at least try to get Kirk to weigh the consequences before going along with it.   
  
The only possible explanation is that Spock is so convinced of the Klingons’ exceptional brutality that he feels it’s logical to provoke this retaliation--because if the occupation is allowed to continue that will kill even more people. The episode seems to want to have it both ways here. On the one hand, the most appealing part of this episode is the way in which it forces Kirk and Kur to understand how similar they are. Both regard the Organians as “sheep” whose lack of manly belligerence makes them unworthy of the robust hatred that Kirk and Kur cherish for each other. In the final confrontation with the Organians, they’re both making the same arguments and you can tell that if they thought that dancing the tango together would help convince the Organians to let them get their war on, they’d totally do it. (Maybe they’d do it anyway. Kur seems to have a thing for “Barona” from the get-go.) On the other hand, Coon seems very anxious to reassure everyone that the Klingons really are utterly and essentially evil, or at least way more evil than the Federation. Kirk establishes that the Klingons are partial to a lot of the same things Stalin was fond of: forced labor, total suppression of free speech or even thought, and so on. The “mind-sifter” makes it all that much more 1984. So while the episode is very critical of Kirk’s desire for war, it’s hard to know exactly how we’re supposed to take all the bullshit Kirk slings in his first meeting with the Council about all the great things the Federation can do for Organia and how all they ask in return is “to let us help you.” This is why I think Spock’s enthusiastic (for him) cooperation in all of Kirk’s provocations is so important: you figure that if Spock is willing to go along with all this, that must mean that Klingons are pretty awful. So, the Klingons and humans are indeed a lot alike, except for the humans being good and the Klingons being evil.   
  
As others have noted, in “Devil in the Dark,” there’s a long gap between the moment when the viewer figures out what those silicone nodules are and the moment when Kirk finally gets it. It’s a useful gap in that it generates a greater climactic payoff at the end; but it also gets us frustrated because it seems like Kirk ought to be able to figure this out. In “Errand of Mercy,” that gap is even longer and far more frustrating. Kirk’s own preconceptions about this kind of “stagnant” non-industrialized society—and his own rage and hatred of the Klingons—render him so painfully stupid that despite mounting evidence to the contrary it never occurs to Kirk to wonder whether perhaps these simple peasants are not as dumb as they seem. Sort of like how…no. I can’t do the whole American politics analogy. It’s just too depressing.  
  
It must be really different watching this show if you’re not an American. Kind of wish I could watch it that way. It would be less painful.  
  
I will say this much: I have been complaining all along that these guys can’t imagine a solution to violence that doesn’t involve more violence. At last, the Organians have come up with an alternative: instead of enforcing peace through the threat of annihilation, simply make it physically impossible for the combatants to connect. Genius idea. Of course in order to execute it you need powers which to all intents and purposes are magical, but still, I salute the visionary thinking. I have to say, though, I don’t know if I would want to make the transition to incorporeal energy being, even if it meant no more war. It’s really hard for me to imagine how you enjoy a disembodied existence. It’s also hard to see why the Organians maintain this elaborate pretense purely for the convenience of visiting humanoids—or really, why they continue to hang out on this planet at all, since there’s nothing stopping them now from traveling through the farthest reaches of space. Except for homesickness, I guess. I also note that the ORganians refer to the blowing up of the munitions dump as a violent act, despite the fact that no sentient life forms were harmed in it; evidently being incorporeal hasn’t changed their opposition to violence against property.   
  
I will also admit to having kind of a soft spot for Kur, whose cynicism makes a refreshing contrast to Kirk’s earnest blustering. And I have to say Spock kind of looks good in Vulcan trader garb. As for Kirk, I don’t know why, having finally gotten him out of those gold jerseys, they decided to stick him in a yellow caftan.  
  
Ah well. Up next: What of Lazarus?


	26. THE ALTERNATIVE FACTOR

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the "worst TOS episode ever" question is bandied about, people usually bring up legendary howlers like "Spock's Brain" or "The Omega Glory" or "And the Children Shall Lead." But I seriously think that this one may actually be the worst episode they ever made--or if not the worst, then the least entertaining. Which is too bad, because the premise itself could have been interesting.

**STARDATE: October 10, 2011**

**THE ALTERNATIVE FACTOR**  
 **Written by Don Ingalls**  
  
A terrible title for a terrible episode. I might propose as a serious alternative, "What of Lazarus?" or, as a smart-ass alternative, "The Suckiness Factor."  
  
 **The Summary** : Well, this is going to be a challenge.   
  
All right, the setup is that while surveying an apparently uninteresting and lifeless planet the Enterprise is suddenly rocked by a massive disturbance in the universe which is represented by the superimposition of a shot of a nebula-centric night sky over the image, a lot of sharp crackling sounds, spinning things, and general throwing of people around the bridge. Spock reports that it is as if the entire field of magnetic phenomena just "blinked." It happens again. Turns out that this effect is being felt universe-wide but that the Enterprise is right in the middle of it.  Because for some reason they interpret this as a prelude to invasion, Starfleet orders Kirk to investigate while everyone else gets the hell out of dodge. Kirk and Spock go down to the planet, where they discover a one-seater spaceship and a crazy man standing on top of the Vasquez Rocks screaming about how they can still stop him because there's still time.  
  
That's as much coherence as this plot will ever have. The alien is named Lazarus and he says he is pursuing a humanoid responsible for destroying his world. Lazarus has these fits every once in a while where he starts staggering around and then all of a sudden we are in an overexposed limbo world where two nearly indistinguishable white-on-white figures battle each other in slow motion. This ends and we go back to Lazarus, and are told that there's been another one of these 'blinks.' Now, I'm going to tell you that what's happening is that there are two Lazaruses, one from our universe and one from an identical parallel universe which exists in the same time and space as ours but which is its polar opposite in terms of matter (we're the matter, theyr'e the antimatter). The fits/"blinks" happen at moments when the Lazaruses are exchanging places, which always involves some kind of combat in the overexposed limbo world, which represents a "corridor" between the two universes. At some point one of the Lazaruses became the first person from the 'other' universe to cross into ours; when our Lazarus discovered he had an antimatter double he lost his mind and became fixated on tracking the antimatter Lazarus down and destroying him. Which is Very Bad, because when two otherwise identical particles of matter and antimatter come into contact, both universes blow up.  
  
I am telling you this because there is no way you would get it from a summary of the plot, which does an absolutely crap job of conveying any of this through anything other than straight exposition. Much of the episode is about Kirk and crew laboriously working out the fact that there are two Lazaruses who look identical and who never appear in the same place at the same time--a fact [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) deduced without any help about 5 minutes after Lazarus showed up. But you can't blame them, because neither the writer nor the actor playing Lazarus does anything that would help you differentiate the two characters. No matter what markers you use it's usually unclear which Lazarus you're watching at any specific time. One Lazarus gets a wound on his forehead which McCoy notices appearing and disappearing but they dont' seem to have been consistent about which Lazarus actually has the wound. Crazy Lazarus and Sane Lazarus are both after dilithium crystals, which somehow are necessary to pass back and forth between universes (though this seems to be happening periodically anyhow without them). Worst of all, Crazy and Sane Lazarus don't really act that different and both change their stories about what's really going on multiple times. [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) tried using Lazarus's wacky facial hair to track this but that was no good as the changes in facial hair seem to have been more related to how long the actor had been sweating into that highly unconvincing beard than anything else.   
  
The best and indeed the only truly coherent scene in the episode is a conversation between Spock and Kirk in the conference room in which they figure out what's going on. I like it because for once Kirk is portrayed as  a) knowing something about and b) actually interested in problems of space, time, and theoretical physics, and this makes his conversation with Spock more interesting and gives the actors somewhere to go with the interaction.   
  
There is all kinds of going back and forth to the planet, with and without one Lazarus or the other. Finally Kirk, who is chasing down some dilithium crystals that one of the Lazaruses stole, accidentally gets tossed into the 'corridor' and comes out the other side, where he meets Sane Lazarus, who clears up any parts of the plot which were not already established by the conference room conversation. Sane Lazarus explains that if Crazy Lazarus is able to 'cross over at a time of his own choosing' and grapple with Sane Lazarus, everything we know and much that we don't know goes kaboom. Sane Lazarus's plan is to get Crazy Lazarus into the corridor and then keep him there...forever. Kirk finds Lazarus's sacrifice for the good fo the universe very affecting. Kirk heads back to his own universe, beats the crap out of Crazy Lazarus whiel Spock and a huge security team look on, and throws him into the corridor, where the two Lazaruses duke it out again. Kirk then destroys Crazy Lazarus's spacecraft so that Crazy Lazarus can't come back again. The disturbances cease, and Kirk et al. go back to the ship, Kirk pausing to muse, "But what of Lazarus?" **END SUMMARY**

  
This episode is a real missed opportunity. It's one of the few real sci-fi premises they've used so far and it could have been made pretty interesting. The visual effects are crude, but they're interesting, and pretty trippy. I should also note, so that she doesn't get lost in the ranting, that this episode introduces Lieutenant Masters, Star Trek's first African-American female engineer. I don't know what James Doohan was doing with his time at the end of the season; but he's not in this episode, so it's Lieutenant Masters who deals with all the stuff involving the dilithium crystals. It is too bad for girl geeks everywhere that her character got totally buried in such a lousy episode. McCoy, by the way, still leaves highly suspicious patients completely alone in sickbay while he goes off to play Facebook games on his monitor. And it's still not a good idea.  
  
The problem is the storytelling. It sucks.Since the basic idea driving this plot is pretty simple, the only way to make it work as an episode is to allow the viewers to piece the puzzle together for themselves. But because the writing and acting is so inconsistent, the viewers have no hope of doing this. So instead we get stretches of confused action punctuated by moments of stasis where either we are served up whole steaming chunks of exposition or we watch the two Lazaruses fighting in limbo for what seems like hours at a time. The fact that this episode provides some kind of interesting new stuff for Kirk--his sense of betrayal at being used as the 'bait' by Starfleet Command, his hitherto well-concealed interest in science and his empathy for the poor bastard who will be in hell for all eternity trying to save the universe--in no way compensates for its wholesale failure either to make sense or to sustain the viewer's interest.  
  
Oh, but I did think of one other nifty piece of this episode. It is this line, from an exchange between McCoy and Kirk about crazy Lazarus:  
  
"Pain can drive a man harder than pleasure, Doctor. I'm sure you know that."   
  
Really? You're SURE he knows that? How exactly? Were you there when he learned it?  
  
  
  
Ah well. Up next: Joan Collins!


	27. THE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The authorship controversy surrounding this justly celebrated episode is a saga unto itself. Briefly, Harlan Ellison wrote the original script which was then significantly rewritten by D. C. Fontana and Gene Roddenberry. Ellison hated all of the modifications and published his original script complete with a long screed about how his beautiful script was traduced and violated by the hacks on the Gene Team. Fans have debated the merits ever since. I have not read Ellison's original screenplay, but based on the spoilers about it that I have gleaned, my feeling is that I would probably like the final version better. There is more discussion of the authorship problem in the comments on the [original livejournal entry](http://idairsauthor.livejournal.com/45989.html).

**STARDATE: OCTOBER 29**

**THE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER**  
 **by Harlan Ellison (with unacknowledged help from D. C. Fontana)**  
  
There are some major problems here. But compared to "The Alternative Factor," this thing is frickin' _Middlemarch_.   
  
I mean that in a good way.  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise is orbiting a planet from which massive waves of time/space displacement are emanating. They are recording all this for the good of science when a console blows up, sending Sulu crashing to the ground unconscious. McCoy comes to the bridge and administers something which I think is called cordrozine. Sulu recovers instantly. Sadly, a particularly vicious time/space ripple tosse the Enterprise around and causes McCoy to shove the hypo into his stomach, involuntarily injecting himself with a huge dose of this notoriously 'tricky' drug. A sweating, pallid, paranoid McCoy leaps to his feet screaming about "assassins" and fights his way out of the bridge and down to the transporter room, which as usual is staffed only by Starfleet's most easily overpowered man. Two karate chops later, McCoy is running amok down on the planet. Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and Uhura beam down to look for him. What they find is a set of pseudo-greco-roman ruins dominated by a large glowing vagina, I'm sorry, a large glowing donut, I'm sorry, a large glowing Henry Moore statue, all right look, it's a big irregular oval thing standing up on its long side. Actually, it doesn't start glowing until Kirk finally asks Spock what the thing is, and it lights up and a deep booming voice says it's been waiting for someone to ask a frickin' question already.  
  
It introduces itself as the Guardian of Forever. It is a time travel portal. It starts showing the landing party their planet's history, inviting them to jump through and visit. While Kirk wonders if they can go back and prevent McCoy from shooting himself up, Spock belatedly realizes he should be recording all these priceless images for posterity. (By the way, this is another link in the chain of episodes in which the Star Trek characters are forced to watch bad TV and declare it, as Kirk says, "strangely compelling." The Guardian is vaguely rectangular and that opening the middle works exactly like a TV screen; the images projected appear to have been culled from newsreels and cheesy historical movies.) Shortly after he turns his tricorder on, McCoy charges into the oval and disappears into the mist. The images stop rolling. Uhura mentions that she has lost contact with the ship. The Guardian informs them that McCoy has gone back in time and that the timeline that created them no longer exists.   
  
Kirk and Spock work it out with the Guardian that they will go back in time, aiming for shortly before McCoy's appearance, and try to stop him from screwing up the timeline. They jump into the portal at what Spock thinks is the right time. They come out in New York in 1930. After stealing some clothes and escaping from a policeman, they hide out in what turns out to be the basement of a mission run by America's sweetheart Ruby Keeler, I'm sorry, Edith Keeler. Kirk sweet-talks Edith into letting them do cleaning and maintenance at the mission for 15 cents an hour. Once she gets them a room in her building, Spock begins trying to construct an apparatus capable of playing back the tricorder images they recorded from the Guardian so that they can find out WTF McCoy did.  
While Kirk gets smitten with the idealistic and visionary Edith (not only does she believe that peace is the way, she predicts the development of atomic power and of space travel), Spock discovers two contradictory newspaper reports, one indicating that Edith dies in a traffic accident in 1930 and one indicating that she meets with President Roosevelt in 1936. Convinced that Edith is the key factor, they still don't know whether she's 'supposed' to live or die when--unbeknownst to them--McCoy shows up in a dark alley. Still totally insane, McCoy manages to stagger into the mission, where Edith helps him into a bed in a secluded room and tends to him until he recovers. Spock manages to repair his playback system and shows Kirk that in the timeline where Edith Keeler doesn't die, she becomes the leader of a pacifist movement that delays the US's entry into the second world war. This allows Germany to develop the A-bomb before the US does and win the war. Therefore, no space exploration, no Starfleet, no utopia, no Enterprise. Kirk's response is to inform Spock that he thinks he's in love with Edith, to which he replies, "Jim, Edith Keeler must die."  
  
While headed out to a Clark Gable picture, Edith happens to mention to Kirk that "Dr. McCoy" didn't know who Clark Gable was either. Kirk instantly becomes highly agitated and dashes across the street to the mission, telling Edith to stay where she is. Spock and McCoy come out of the mission; joyous reunion ensues. Edith, curious of course, begins crossing the street. McCoy spots a car headed in her direction and tries to run out to save her; Kirk grabs McCoy and physically holds him there until the car has hit Edith and killed her. An appalled McCoy asks Kirk if he knows what he just did. "He knows, Doctor," says Spock.  
  
Spock and McCoy return to the planet, followed a moment later by McCoy. The Guardian offers to send them on yet more fascinating journeys. Kirk says, "Let's get the hell out of here." And they do. **END SUMMARY**

  
As I said, I've never liked time travel episodes. But I have a soft spot for this one--even though, as we will see, this particular time travel plot has some unusually large holes. It's possibly Kirk's least pukeworthy romance, and although I seriously question Joan Collins's credibility as the director of a storefront mission during the Depression (too glamorous, too soft-edged, too British-accented), the writing is decent enough to make you care about Kirk's predicament. The shot of Kirk hanging onto McCoy with his eyes closed and his face wrenched in pain is one of my strongest memories of this show from my youth. But of course that shot conveys something I must always have known on some level, which is that same-gender relationships will always be more important to all the main characters than any heterosexual flings they may occasionally have. Kirk is of course holding McCoy because he needs to immobilize him; but he's also clinging to him for support.   
  
Apart from the Great Dilemma, of which more later, what really sells this episode is the character stuff. The Kirk/Spock stuff does incorporate some of the kind of 'caper' comedy Fonatana provided in "Tomorrow is Yesterday":  
  
 **KIRK: My friend is obviously Chinese...I see you've noticed the ears. They're actually easy to explain.  
  
SPOCK: Perhaps the unfortunate accident I had as a child...  
  
KIRK: Yes, the unfortunate accident he had as a child. He got his head caught in a mechanical...rice-picker. Fortunately there was an American missionary living there at the time, who also happened to be a skilled plastic surgeon...**  
  
...and mercifully, the cop cuts him off.   
  
When I was about 15 I thought all this was comedy gold. Now, it just kind of makes you cringe. However, I'm now better equipped to appreciate the episode's subtler beauties, like the way Kirk manipulates Spock into taking on the apparently impossible task of creating a tricorder playback system with early 20th century technology ("Yes, it would be a challenge...Forgive me. I sometimes expect too much of you"). Spock's interactions with the Guardian are understated yet hilarious (the Guardian is the first thing in the universe to insult Spock's knowledge of science). The bit where Kirk comes back with their groceries and Spock informs him that he needs a "small block" of platinum is still priceless. (Implicitly, this bit establishes that Spock is vegetarian.) Spock's loyalty to Kirk impresses even Edith Keeler, despite the fact that he often stares after the two of them as they leave in kind of a dark way. Plotwise this can of course be explained by his growing conviction that Edith is what's standing between them and their timeline; but of course we know there are other forces at work.  
  
Though I had not remembered this as clearly, it's also a great episode for McCoy, once he stops sweating and screaming. Crazy Bones's initial encounter with the poor bum who winds up zapping himself with a stolen phaser is hilarious in the bizarre/dark way one associates more with Douglas Adams than cheesy early Trek. ("You!" McCoy shouts, pointing at him. "What planet is this?") His unhinged rant about the barbarity of 20th century medicine impressed me even as a youth. Recovering Bones is also highly entertaining. Though he refuses to accept the reality in which he has awakened, insisting right up to the point that he meets Kirk and Spock that it's all a cordrizene hallucination, he gradually warms up to Edith, who handles Crazy Bones like a pro and seems genuinely charmed by Recovering Bones's cantankerous chivalry.  
  
Ellison/Fontana even get Uhura down to the planet surface for once and give her a few decent lines. It's true that one of them is the first of many "Captain, I'm frightened"s; but Nichols manages to deliver that with dignity. She states it like a matter of record--Brecht would have loved that--and though one might wish Kirk would acknowledge her directly, the fact that his response boils down to "Me too" helps somewhat.   
  
Actually what happens is that Kirk says, "Earth isn't there, at least the Earth we know...we're totally alone," and looks up at the night sky while the camera pans out into the suddenly empty universe. (Whoever decided to have them show up on the nighttime part of the planet for once was a genius; the darkness and dramatic lighting mitigate the cheesiness of the set and emphasize the stranded characters' fear and isolation.) Her touching wish for Kirk to find "happiness at least" in the past meets, once again, with no direct response, but then Kirk is in Stoic Mode by that time so whatever.   
  
So, as far as the characters go, it's a great episode. Shame about the plot.  
  
First of all, let me point out that like so many time travel stories this one assumes that there is only one "right" way for history to turn out. Though we do not, in theory, believe in fate in our enlightened age, most time travel writers are not comfortable with suggesting that there is nothing inevitable about history--that there's nothing necessarily "right" about the timeline that happens to have produced us. Typically, anyone who time travels with the intention of intervening either fails to change the timeline or makes it worse. Most time travelers are unwilling to accept any intervention that will lead to their not being born, even if the resulting timeline might turn out much better for other people.   
  
In this case, that assumed inevitability is used to undercut the show's idealism. Kirk is attracted to Edith Keeler largely because her vision of the future anticipates his own utopian reality. One of their love scenes is a discussion about how someday people will stop spending money on war and death and start spending it, as Kirk says, on "life." (Dream on, sweetheart. I don't see it happening.) As Kirk says, Edith is right: "Peace was the way." But, says Spock, she was right "at the wrong time." Her commitment to peace--laudable, the episode acknowledges, in every way--is in fact a threat to world safety under these specific circumstances, so much so that the "right" future can only be assured by her death.  
  
At 15, of course, I didn't think twice about this. Naturally the 1930s would have been the "wrong time" for American pacifism. I mean who wants Hitler to win? But of course I now know that it is **always** the "wrong time" for pacifism. There's always some asshole dictator out there who either is a legitimate threat can be puffed up into one in order to justify whatever war has to be fought. To achieve a world without war, as Star Trek claims 23rd century Earth has (without war on Earth, at any rate...regarding other planets, all bets are off), it will eventually have to be possible to say that it is the right time for pacifism even when a ruthless dictator is trying to rule the world--because *some* ruthless dictator always will be.    
  
If, in fact, pacifism will ever become a viable political force, it will have to find a way to defeat the Hitlers of the future. Peace might have defeated Hitler if it could have been mobilized _within_ Germany. It would have required massive organization and massive civil disobedience--general strikes, mass desertions, organized and universal disobedience on the part of the army and police. Theoretically, however, it could have been done. A ruthless dictator cannot function without the help of his subject population. The fact that the ruthless dictator nearly always secures the help of large chunks of his subject population is a testament to how flawed we are as a species and a depressing predictor of just how unlikely it is that we will ever get to the Star Trek version of the future.   
  
Even suppose Edith Keeler had survived and had "delayed" (the writers are not even willing to credit the idea that a massive pacifist movement might have prevented the US from entering the war at all) the US entry into WWII, how do we know what the results would have been? The sabotage operations that scuttled the "heavy water" experiments Spock alludes to weren't even carried out by US forces; that was a combined effort on the part of the Norwegian resistance and British Special Operations. If we assume, as Spock seems to, that without this "heavy water" Germany wouldn't have developed the A-bomb, then Hitler could still have lost the war; it's not like England and the Soviet Union just rolled over. Or let's say Hitler won the war and went on to rule the world. He'd surely have done plenty more damage before his inevitable downfall came. But who's to say that the experience of living under Hitler's fascist rule wouldn't have created so many common bonds between all the world's subjugated peoples that by the time he was eventually deposed, they would have been ready to team up to end the modern nation-state and its miseries once and for all? Maybe the resulting planetary system of government, whatever it was, would have been successful enough at eliminating military conflict that by the time we reached 2011 we might come out ahead, relative to our own timeline, in terms of the sheer quantity of human misery inflicted.  
  
But this episode is not interested in any of that. The problem of Keeler's right-but-wrong pacifism is simply used to create a standard temporal-pollution problem which must be solved in the generically mandated way: by going back and 'fixing' the 'error' introduced by the traveler. All right, fine. I have a few questions.  
  
This is one brought up earlier by Darth Julie, but raised spontaneously and independent by [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) when she was watching it with me. Edith crosses the street to meet her death only because she is curious to know what's going on with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. She is, in fact, only on the other side of the street at that moment because she was on her way to the movies with Kirk; so if he hadn't gone out there, she might ahve been safe at home looking over her war bonds that night. So if McCoy hadn't gone crazy down on that planet, how would that accident ever have happened in the first place?  
  
This objection can be answered. [](http://mishaslair.livejournal.com/profile)[**mishaslair**](http://mishaslair.livejournal.com/) brought up the theory of the 'self-correcting' timeline, according to which any human temporal intervention will eventually be neutralized as the 'right' timeline inevitably reasserts itself. Or you could look at this is one of those paradoxes: though it appears that McCoy's flying leap into the past is what broke the timeline, in fact it is and has always been the only thing that made the Enterprise possible in the first place. From that point of view, the past Kirk et al. have always known has always been made possible precisely by the fact that in 1930 Kirk, McCoy, and Spock all wound up at Edith Keeler's mission and between the three of them ensured that she got run over, thus allowing history to progress in such a way that they could eventually be born. It's just that they are not actually *aware* of this part of their history because although chronologically it happened long before they were born, experientially it doesn't happen until this very moment. The fact that Kirk and Spock must know the 'right' timeline in order to make the intervention that creates the 'right' timeline just shows you how much fucking with linear time fucks with narrative and memory and life in general.  
  
I've got a much simpler question: WTF is up with Spock's tricorder?  
  
First of all, the episode is very inconsistent about how playback works on that thing. On the planet, Spock seems to be able to use the tricorder all by itself to determine when he and Kirk need to jump. Once on Earth in 1930, however, he and Spock have to go through this whole elaborate process of creating a machine capable of playing back the images recorded on the tricorder in such a way that they can read them. Spock does mention that he has been able to "slow down" the stream of images, so maybe that's what the gigantic radio-tube apparatus is for. But it kind of seems to me like what happened was that they had to find a way to stagger Kirk's realization that he would have to let his girlfriend die, and Spock's wrestling with "this zinc-plated, vaccuum-tubed culture" was an entertaining way to do that.   
  
More seriously, one might ask the question: How does the tricorder record BOTH of Edith Keeler's fates? Or, more to the point: how does it record EITHER?  
  
As far as we are told, all Spock is doing on the planet is using the tricorder like a video camera, storing the images shown in the Guardian in order in its little tricorder brain. Well, as soon as McCoy jumps through the mist, those images stop appearing. So how could the tricorder have recorded what happened *after* McCoy arrived? Kirk and Spock jump through about a week ahead of McCoy--and once they jump, they are no longer there on the planet to record the Guardian's images. So, again, how would the tricorder record what happens *after* McCoy arrives?   
  
It can't have. That's the answer to _that_ question. The writers make the tricorder record both fates because otherwise there's no way to guarantee that Kirk and Spock know that "Edith Keeler must die"--and if they don't know that, then there's no emotional payoff at the end when Kirk stops McCoy from saving her. So they break a few laws of cause and effect to get there. So what? How bout that shot of Kirk hanging onto McCoy and grimacing, huh?  
  
It's interesting to look at this as, on Fontana's part, a kind of do-over of "Tomorrow is Yesterday." Kirk all of a sudden is now well-informed and highly intuitive when it comes to time travel and its many paradoxes; the encounter with law enforcement takes up about a minute instead of 20 minutes; the emotional stakes are raised by making the poor sap from the past who has to get a raw deal a love interest rather than a brother pilot.   
  
Anyway. We'll always have the City on the Edge of Forever--though this time through, for the first time, I pondered the significance of the fact that the culture that evidently built the Guardian seems to have been completely wiped out. Evidently someone tweaked *their* timeline once too often.  
  
Up next: Flying brain cells!


	28. OPERATION: ANNIHILATE!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For anyone who was resisting the slash vibes, this episode basically makes it impossible to hold out against the siren song of K/S. "Amok Time" will finish off any remaining dissenters.

**STARDATE: November 2, 2011**

**OPERATION: ANNIHILATE!**  
 **Written by Stephen Carabatsos**   
  
Another terrible title. But to give Carabatsos credit, it’s hard to come up with a better one that doesn’t give away something about the plot. You know, like “Blinded By The Light” or “He Blinded Me With Science,” or "Whom Flying Jellyfish Destroy," or “The Third Eyelid.”  
  
Oh…no…wait…I have the perfect title! “Honey Badger Don’t Care!”  
  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise is on its way to Denavan, which is in the path of  an epidemic of mass insanity which has been working its way across part of the galaxy. It’s not clear exactly why they’re investigating this but perhaps the fact that Kirk’s brother, Sam, and his family live on Denavan has something to do with it. They attempt to rescue a Denavan ship which is flying directly into the sun; that doesn’t work, but just before the Denavan ship burns up they hear the pilot shouting that he’s finally ‘free’ of something. An equally cryptic communication from Kirk’s sister-in-law about how “they” are coming is cut off at the source. Kirk, Spock, Hot Yeoman 7.0 and a few redshirts beam down to the planet, which this time looks suspiciously like either a college or a museum campus.  They are attacked by a party of Denavans who attempt to club them while yelling about how they don’t want to hurt them. After stunning the attackers they hear a scream and go charging in its direction. Turns out Kirk’s sister in law is hysterically shouting about how “they” have arrived. Kirk’s brother is dead and his nephew Peter is unconscious. McCoy and Kirk take the victims back up to the Enterprise, leaving Spock in charge of the landing party. In sickbay, the sister-in-law—gasping in agony all the while—reports that horrible creatures from somewhere have attacked them and are using pain to control them and coerce them into building ships so that they can spread to other parts of the galaxy. She is overcome by pain and dies.   
  
Kirk heads back to the planet and is along for the ride when Spock et al. decide to check out a strange buzzing noise coming from a secluded spot in the courtyard. It turns out that many round, ugly, flat, plastic, nasty things are roosting all over the buildings. They look kind of like big blisters, except that they are made of plastic, they pulse, and they zoom around on strings. The landing party phasers a few of them, but though they drop to the ground they are not destroyed. (Looking at one of the downed creatures, the otherwise totally useless Hot Yeoman 7.0 utters the best line ever assigned to one of her ilk: “It doesn’t even look real.”) Disappointed to find that these things stand up to phaser fire, the landing party is beating a hasty retreat when one of the little bastards peels itself off a wall and zooms out after them, landing squarely on Spock’s back. Kirk rushes to help the agonizing Spock, ripping the thing off him; but it’s too late. Spock’s got that Experiencing Unbearable Pain look on his face, and even being stretched out in his captain’s arms like a big ol’ Vulcan Pieta cannot console him.  
  
Up on the Enterprise, McCoy-—assisted by Nurse Chapel, who's back and now inexplicably a strawberry blonde—-operates on Spock to try to remove whatever it is that the creature injected into him. He ultimately decides that he can’t; the poor bastard’s body is crawling with tentacles that are twining round his nervous system. Spock wakes up and forces his way out of sickbay; he makes it to the bridge, where he tries to take control of the ship until he is finally sedated by McCoy. Back in sickbay—-now restrained-—Spock informs everyone that he’s just fine to return to duty because “pain is a thing of the mind” and he is controlling the pain these tentacles are causing him with his special fucking badass Vulcan mental discipline. Kirk and McCoy are a little skeptical about whether Spock can really pull this off, so they leave him restrained for a while to see how it goes. Think honey badger has any doubts about whether he can control his own body even while being tortured by some intergalactic jellyfish from hell? Honey badger don’t care! Honey badger don’t give a fuck about your piss-ant security restraints, either. He rips them right off and is next spotted, in uniform and with a little red metal box, trying to convince Scotty to beam him down to the planet. Scotty prudently decides to wait to hear it from Kirk; a brief battle in the transporter room ends in Scott holding Spock in a standoff until Kirk and McCoy arrive. Spock explains that someone has to go down to the planet to trap one of these things, that since he’s already infected he’s no longer at risk, and that he’s perfectly under control. Kirk says I love you, honey badger, go on down there and be your beautiful badass self.  
  
Well, not exactly. But Spock does go down and put one of these things in a box and come back up. He and McCoy try to figure out something that will kill the thing, working from the hypothesis that the Denavan pilot managed to kill his own infestation by getting close enough to the sun. They can't come up with a damn thing that harms these creatures. Kirk realizes that if they can’t find a cure then his duty will be to nuke all of Denavan—-along, of course, with Spock and his nephew--to prevent the thing from spreading. So Kirk keeps irrationally demanding the solution everyone tells him they can’t find until, while Spock enumerates the Sun’s scientific properties, Kirk starts playing with a flashing light and it occurs to him that perhaps the creatures hate bright light. By God, the Inspired Child has done it again. They put the thing in a chamber and zot it with searing white light and darned if it doesn’t curl up and die. Kirk and Spock then agree that they need to try this out with an infected human subject. Bones points out that light this bright will totally fry Spock’s optic nerves. Spock and Kirk say do it, there’s no other choice. Spock goes into the chamber, thousands of candlepower are unleashed upon him, and he emerges cured--but also, as he says, “quite blind.”   
  
It then finally occurs to McCoy, after scanning the analysis from their tests on the creature itself, that he didn’t necessarily have to use the entire spectrum of visible light. So in other words, they could have done this without actually blinding poor honey badger. Honey badger don’t care...but Kirk and Bones are pretty bummed.  
  
So they deploy a load of “ultraviolet” satellites around Denavan and zap Denavan with UV rays and all the flying jellyfish from hell start smoking. This also cures their human hosts, and nobody goes blind. Hooray…except for how McCoy is still sitting in the dark thinking about how much it sucks that he gratuitously blinded his poor honey badger.  
  
But look who’s back on the bridge all of a sudden! It’s honey badger! Turns out Vulcans have an inner eyelid that instinctively protects them from the bright Vulcan sun! The blindness was temporary! Hooray! And look, there goes Kirk over to his beloved honey badger to…tease him AGAIN about how he has no emotions? WTF?!   
  
Hey, banter boy, as long as we’re talking about emotional reactions, hasn’t it been a while since we saw any signs that you were emotionally affected by your brother’s horrible death? But on we go, warp factor whatever. **END SUMMARY**

  
I’ll admit it: this episode used to scare the shit out of me. I will perhaps talk elsewhere about some of the ways in which I can now clearly see this episode showing up [my writing.](http://www.plaidder.com/wof) For now, let me say that the unutterable cheesiness of the flying brain cells does not change the fact that there are enough analogies between how McCoy tries to treat Spock and how cancer treatment works to continue freaking me out. (Having failed to remove the thing through surgery—he can’t, it’s metastasized—McCoy eventually resorts to radiation. It works, but at some cost to the patient.) Nor does it change the pathos of all the horrible decisions that have to be made about Spock once he becomes infected.   
  
Nowadays, probably, instead of calling for giant flying plastic brain cells, the writers would make the invidious enemy a microscopic organism. Either that, or CGI would be called into play. But I will give it to the props department on this one: those giant flying plastic jellyfish are freaky. They make freaky noises too. Yeah, you know it’s fake; but it’s still disgusting and nasty and creepy and I get itchy just thinking about it.   
  
I was saying that “Amok Time” is what explains K/S, but in fact this episode seems to me to mark a noticeable ramping-up of their “friendship.” When Spock is first attacked, Kirk responds immediately and with intense concern, showing not the slightest discomfort with physical intimacy as he manhandles him in his attempt to rip the creature off his back. (I swear that somewhere I have seen a blooper in which the flying brain cell lands on Spock’s butt instead of his back.) When he discovers that Spock didn’t have to go blind, Kirk gets about this close to just tearing McCoy’s head off. Why he’s pissed off at Bones over this, since Bones was the only one sane enough to object to the procedure, is beyond me…but anyway. McCoy also demonstrates an uncharacteristic and touching regard for Spock, and is genuinely remorseful about ‘his’ mistake.   
  
This makes the obligatory final banter easier to take. It’s finally made explicit that Spock is in on the joke and enjoys his own zingers. When Kirk observes that though most other people would find themselves emotional upon regaining their sight, Spock surely felt nothing, Spock replies that actually he had a very strong reaction because the first thing he saw was McCoy’s face bending over him. (One might wonder what was happening the moment before that one.) McCoy replies that it’s a shame Spock’s blindness didn’t increase his appreciation for beauty, and then everyone gets back to work. Spock is also allowed the last word; after McCoy asks Kirk sotto voce not to ever tell Spock that McCoy said he was the best first officer in the fleet, Spock says, “Why thank you, Doctor.” So, rather than the two bullies ganging up to tease the weirdo, this is now just a perfectly normal example of three ostensibly heterosexual men concealing their terrifyingly intense emotional attachments to each other by harshing on each other in public.  
  
Nurse Chapel is evidently still mooning over Spock. While assisting with Spock’s operation, she protests McCoy’s decision to close up, horrified by the knowledge that thousands of these tentacles are still inside him. However, this never reaches the same pukeworthiness levels as in “The Naked Time,” and although it is another annoying suggestion that women are too emotional to be trusted with the important jobs, hey, at least she’s back. Kirk is an asshole to Uhura after they lose contact with his sister in law; she, of course, handles it with dignity, responding to his rants with withering politeness. He never apologizes to her.   
  
Kirk’s obvious reluctance to destroy Denavan, incidentally, sheds new light on the “General Order 24” question left over from “A Taste of Armageddon.” There’s only a million people on Denavan. And yet, though he has compelling reasons to do it and though the individual Denavanians he cares about are no down there, Kirk refuses to take this planet out even when urged to it by Spock. Which does suggest that Kirk never really intended to destroy Eminiar, which must have been much more heavily populated since it was losing 3 million people a year in the war. I know, no continuity; still, this episode was written by an insider and produced by Gene L. Coon, so it's possible someone was thinking about this.  
  
Though I am loath to give up any of the emotional pleasures the episode provides, I have to say that I find the resolution utterly implausible. No, it is not merely implausible; it is Wack. It is Wack not only because it appears to me to make no scientific sense whatsoever, but because it requires three presumably intelligent people to behave like idiots.   
  
First of all, it is inconceivable to me that using bright light on this creature would not have occurred to Spock or McCoy as one of the first things to try. I understand that the point is supposed to be that whereas they are merely scientists whose specialized knowledge leads them to examine individual leaves on individual trees, only the inspired child has the creativity and vision necessary to perceive the forest. That is bullshit. Being a scientist does not mean you can’t figure out that the sun is bright.  
  
Second, Spock and McCoy both talk about how they have bombarded the thing with every kind of radiation they can think of. The ultimate solution turns out to be UV rays. Is that not a form of radiation? Would it not have occurred to them to try this? And come to think of it, isn’t this going to give all of Denavan one motherfucker of a sunburn? Poor bastards. Saved from the tentacles…killed by skin cancer.  
  
In fact, the only thing that makes Kirk’s idea any different from the stuff Spock and McCoy have already tried is brightness. This is the simple fact that the specialists have supposedly overlooked: the sun emits a bright light. For Kirk’s epiphany to have any validity, we have to believe that there is in fact something about a visibly bright light that is lethal to these creatures in the way that the forms of invisible radiation Spock and McCoy have tried are not. But for the sake of creating McCoy’s “mistake,” they wind up making brightness irrelevant.  
  
All right, let’s say I’m totally wrong about the science. I could be. I still say there is absolutely no reason that they had to jump straight from killing the flying brain cell to nuking Spock’s optical nerves. The situation on Denavan has been more or less stable for a while now: one million people, all crazy. The situation on the Enterprise is relatively stable: Peter still under sedation, Spock hanging Vulcanly on despite the “inconvenience” of his human “half.” These guys couldn’t take an hour to test some different parts of the spectrum on some more of these things to see whether in fact they actually needed a literally blinding white light or not?  
  
Of course they could. Carabatsos just wants the pathos. OK, so we have the pathos. I’d enjoy it more if I weren’t constantly yelling at the characters. I should also point out that some of this pathos derives from the idea that by blinding Spock they are essentially ending his career as “the best first officer in the fleet”—-something that you wouldn’t think, with 23rd century technology, would have to be true.   
  
(If I were Eve Sedgwick I might argue that the blinding of Spock is like the courtmartial in “Billy Budd”. It’s not in fact required by the situation--it is in fact risky and a really bad idea--but it happens because of the desires driving the triangular relationships between the three men involved. In this case, she might argue, Spock and Kirk display a shared willingness and indeed almost an eagerness to endanger Spock’s body which suggests that this act will create a bond between them from which McCoy is excluded (even as he is compelled to triangulate it) and from which both draw a pleasure powerful enough to compensate for the tragic conseqeunces. But I am not Eve Sedgwick, and therefore I will say nothing of these things.)  
  
Anyway. Apart from, you know, the plot, it’s an effective episode and a decent enough way to end the first season. Onward to Ponn Farr!


	29. AMOK TIME

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, OK, "City on the Edge," so beautiful. But "Amok Time" is what it's all about for me. This is the best episode they ever made. Also, hands down, the slashiest. If you only know TOS through the reboot, and you're only going to watch one TOS episode, watch this one. 
> 
> The reboot films will never be able to do "Amok Time," since Vulcan is destroyed. In fact, unless the reboot has decided to redo Vulcan physiology completely, the destruction of Vulcan pretty much guarantees that Spock is not long for this world.
> 
> I discuss in more detail below the fact that when ponn farr is introduced in "Amok Time" there is no evidence that it's supposed to be on a seven-year cycle. That gets added by the team who created "The Cloud-Minders." "Amok Time" seems to be based on the idea that ponn farr is a once-in-a-lifetime event, which I have to say I like better.

**STARDATE: November 11, 2011**

**AMOK TIME**  
 **written by Theodore Sturgeon**  
  
I loved this episode when I was a teenager and thought I was straight. But it's EVEN BETTER now that I know I'm queer.  
  
 **The Summary:** In the corridors of the Enterprise, McCoy accosts Kirk--who has for some reason just climbed up out of some sort of vertical shaft--to tell him he's worried about Spock. Seems Spock has been getting irritable, refusing to eat, and replied to McCoy's expression of concern by threatening to break his neck. Kirk is about to dismiss this when the door of Spock's quarters slides open and Nurse Chapel is flung through it, followed shortly thereafter by the bowl of Vulcan plomyk soup she just brought him. A shouting Spock comes through a few moments later. Seeing Kirk and McCoy, he pulls himself together long enough to request shore leave on Vulcan.   
  
Kirk tries to get Spock to tell him what's going on, but he won't. Spock does convey that he desperately needs to get back to Vulcan, so Kirk diverts the Enterprise there; then Starfleet Command tells him to divert back to Altair 6 because the ceremony he's supposed to attend has been moved up a week, so Kirk has to divert back, promising Spock his trip to Vulcan after the ceremony's over. Lying awake in his quarters, he calls up to this weaselly little guy in a really weird moptop who can't seem to articulate a lot of his initial consonants to ask how much time it would really take to divert to Vulcan. The weaselly little guy, whose name is Chekhov, says he doesn't understand, because they're already en route to wulcan because Spock ordered them to go there. Confronted by Kirk, Spock says he has no memory of doing this but that he accepts that it probably happened. Kirk orders Spock to report to McCoy for examination; McCoy convinces him to actually go through with it, then reports to Kirk that Spock will die in a week if they can't get him to Vulcan.  
  
Kirk goes and confronts Spock again. Spock finally tells him the story we all know so well: Ponn Farr, or Vulcan mating, is a primitive, savage, completely irrational affair shrouded in ritual and mystery and prompted by biological urges that are too strong to ignore. Comes a time in every Vulcan's life when he must return to Vulcan and either mate or die.    
  
Kirk decides to divert to Vulcan and damn the consequences. He is rewarded for this display of loyalty by being asked to be Spock's best man (McCoy is somewhat grudgingly invited along as well). Spock contacts T'Pring, his Intended, who shows up on the screen, eliciting from Uhura the line, "She's lovely. Who is she?" To which Spock responds, "She is my wife."  
  
So, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy head down to Vulcan, where they walk through a load of new and really irritating CGI crap that we don't fucking need until they reach Spock's family's private kuna-kalifii arena. Spock bangs a gong; the procession arrives, including T'Pring, a guy with the hugest Vulcan ears ever named Stonn, and T'Pau, the most badass fucking Vulcan on that whole badass planet. Seriously, T'Pau is borne on in a litter by a load of male attendants wearing the same helmets they used on the Romulan extras in "Balance of Terror," which have been painted silver but still have those convenient and money-saving earflaps. She's pretty small, and she's pretty old, but she has every sentient being in that arena totally under her spell. She gets into it with Spock about bringing in outworlders, but allows the ceremony to go forward.  
  
T'Pring has other ideas. She cuts Spock off and demands the challenge. This means Spock now has to fight a man of her choice for the right to possess her. T'Pring chooses Kirk as her champion. Kirk is a little surprised, but he agrees to do it because he and McCoy think Spock would be no match for Stonn. It's only after they bring in the lirpas--I can only describe this thing as a battle-axe stuck on to the end of a giant aluminum Q-tip--that Kirk finds out that this is a fight to the death.  
  
Well, the music starts and off they go. Kirk survives the lirpa round (though his torso is partially denuded by a swipe to the chest that nearly takes off his nipples). McCoy asks T'Pau to let him even the odds by giving Kirk a shot that will help him breathe in the thin Vulcan atmosphere. T'Pau agrees. McCoy shoots Kirk up and round 2 begins, this time with enormous bandage-type things that are weighted at the ends. After much clutching and rolling, Spock strangles Kirk with the thing until he goes limp. McCoy pronounces Kirk dead. He and Kirk are beamed up while Spock stays behind to ask T'Pring one simple question: WHAT THE FUCK?  
  
Actually, that exchange goes like this:   
  
**SPOCK: Explain.**  
 **T'PRING: Specify.**  
  
And T'Pring explains her plan: She wanted Stonn and not Spock, but she and Spock were already betrothed, and the only way to get out of it was to use the challenge. She picked Kirk because she figured she wins either way: if Kirk wins, he won't want her and Spock will be dead, so she's free to take up with Stonn. If Spock wins, he won't want her, so she gets Stonn. If for some reason Spock wins and DOES want her, well, he won't be wanting her long since he'll be tried for murder; and after that she'll get his name and his dough and Stonn. Spock compliments her on her logic, says goodbye to T'Pau, and beams up.  
  
Spock walks into sickbay and starts talking to McCoy about what's going to happen now that he's resigning and turning himself over to the authorities. Kirk sneaks up behind him. Spock is, initially, overjoyed to see him; but that lasts about a second, and then we're back to more banter. Turns out what McCoy shot Kirk with was a neural paralyzer that would simulate death. Oh, and Starfleet Command calls in to say that T'Pau's request for the Enterprise to divert to Vulcan has been granted, so it's now OK that Kirk disobeyed his orders. Spock and Kirk go off to "mind the store," and they head on out to Altair 6. **END SUMMARY**

Oh, where to begin with the awesomeness.  
  
First of all, this episode marks a quantum leap in the overall quality of the show. It's their first sustained attempt at realizing an alien culture in any kind of nuanced way, and the extra effort they put into building Vulcan as a world makes everything so much better. The camera work is better, the set is better, the costumes are better, the fight choreography is better, the music is better. I never realized this before, but the generic "Star Trek fight music" that I have in my head (you know..."Doo doo DOO DOO DOO DOO doo doo doo doo (doogadoogadoon)) is actually specifically Ponn Farr music. It is introduced for the first time in this episode; it's played during the fight but a more lyrical version of the same theme plays during the scene in which Spock explains ponn farr to Kirk. In fact, all the music written for the scenes on Vulcan has a distinctive sound, and you can kind of hear the composer getting into figuring out what Vulcan music sounds like. Music is incorporated into the ritual itself--the gong, the little bell racks the guards are always shaking, the crazy tourmaline wind chimes, and so on. Everything about this episode, from the costuming on T'Pring and T'Pau to the little Vulcan words and phrases to the hand gestures--this is the episode for which Nimoy invented the split-finger Vulcan salute, used for the first time when he greets T'Pau--tells you the same thing: Somebody really put some thought into this.  
  
Sadly, that annoying "ooooo" female vocal has been added to the theme song in the opening and closing credits. On the plus side, however, DeForest Kelly now gets an opening credit. The duo has officially become a trio.  
  
Also sadly, we are introduced to Chekhov. Concerning that, I have only this to say:  
  
1) The show was doing just fine without him.  
2) If Roddenberry really thought Walter Koenig was a sex symbol, he was out of his mind. (Koenig says in the featurette that most of his fan mail came from girls between the ages of 8 and 14.)  
3) I find Chekhov, on a first meeting, nearly as annoying as Wesley.  
4) The sole and only benefit to having him on the bridge is that now Sulu has someone to talk to. This means he gets more dialogue. Hooray for that.  
  
Nimoy, in the little featurette, talks about how great the script was, and he's right. In the writing and in the plotting, you can tell that this is a script that its writer really loved--I mean in the nurturing and caring way, and not in the crazy Harlan Ellison egomaniacal way. In addition to inventing a raft of Vulcan terms for things and introducing "live long and prosper" as a Vulcan greeting/blessing, Sturgeon works in little references to alien flora and fauna that help give the characters' imaginary world some texture and depth. One thing I particularly admire about the script is the way it gets Kirk and Spock into their Dramatic Confrontation without requiring them to become outrageously stupid. (As opposed to _some_ scripts I could mention.) They have no reason to expect that any of this is going to happen when they go down to Vulcan. Kirk's decision to accept the challenge is, based on the information available to him at the time, risky but reasonable: he figures he'll throw the fight after putting up enough resistance so that "honor is satisfied" and Spock can go ahead with the wedding. By the time he realizes his mistake it's too late to back out. Spock's homicidal frenzy has been gradually building up since the beginning of the episode and is completely believable. McCoy and Kirk still believe that Spock has to either mate or die; and with a slight adjustment to one's suspension of disbelief it's easy enough to believe that the three of them are just so caught up in the intensity of it all that they don't think about just beaming all three of them up and running away. The solution McCoy comes up with instead is perfect: it gets Kirk out of harm's way while respecting T'Pau and this super-sensitive Vulcan thing they've been privileged to witness and allowing Spock (who has already been taunted about his un-Vulcanness by T'Pau) to complete the ritual and save face. It is also clear from the final scene that McCoy was trying to make it possible for Spock to claim T'Pring so that he could mate with her and thus stave off his impending demise. McCoy (after tactlessly sending Nurse Chapel out of the room) eagerly asks Spock what happened "with the girl" after he and Kirk beamed up. Spock reports that once he'd 'killed' Kirk, the ponn farr was over and he felt no desire for the girl whatsoever. So, magically, he is no longer in the position of having to mate or die, and the dilemma that created this whole plot just went up in smoke.  
  
I don't see this as a plot problem. I see it, rather, as perfectly consistent with a number of things Sturgeon does to make this plot as queer as a three-tailed mouse. And I mean that in the best possible way.  
  
Spock's always been marked as different. As I may have mentioned a few times, there are a number of episodes that explore this difference in racial terms. However, the particular form his alienness takes--lack of 'emotion'--has also always marked him as sexually different. Especially in the early episodes (most obviously in "Mudd's Women"), Spock's lack of 'emotion' often manifests itself as the ability to remain rational in situations where his human male colleagues would be misled by their own lust. Even when he gets hit on by Nurse Chapel in "The Naked Time," when the crazy plague finally kicks in, does he chase Nurse Chapel down for some naked time? No, he unburdens his conflicted Vulcan soul to Kirk. The only woman in which Spock has ever shown any interest is Leila, and that was because he was hopped up on happy spores at the time--and when the happy spores wear off, what happens? He dumps Leila for "that man on the bridge."    
  
The fact that Spock's lack of 'emotion' frequently expresses itself as a lack of heterosexual desire, and the fact that what emotion Spock _does_ show is usually directed at Kirk--makes him available to viewers as a queer character. Of course, it all has to remain coded. But, and this is my point, in "Amok Time" you can see Sturgeon playing around with this code till he damn near breaks it.  
  
The easiest place to see this is in the scene in which Spock finally tells Kirk what's going on. Spock is clearly ashamed of his sexuality--after being told that he ordered Chekhov to divert to Vulcan, Spock is so terrified of being seen in this condition that he asks Kirk to "lock him away." His intense reluctance to disclose anything about his own sexuality is of course explained by his Vulcanness: it's taboo to reveal ponn farr to "outworlders." But basically what you have in that scene is Spock coming out, with great pain and angst, to his best friend. Kirk seems on some level to understand the therapeutic value of coming out; though McCoy has already told him enough to make it imperative to go to Vulcan, he pushes Spock to make the revelation--showing far more sensitivity than you would expect from him based on, say, "Charlie X." In fact, I would almost call him a model intaker. He perceives Spock's shame and fear, is able to read Spock's silences well enough to ask him encouraging questions, assures him that their conversation will be confidential, lets him talk, does not ask stupid or intrusive questions, and reassures him again of confidentiality at the end of the conversation: "I haven't heard a word you've said, and I'll get you to Vulcan somehow."  
  
The fact that what Spock is confessing to is _heterosexuality_ only makes this more interesting. Because what we learn is that Spock can experience heterosexuality _only_ as an irresistible "biological" compulsion which overwhelms and annihilates what he thinks of as his 'true' self. Maybe I wouldn't read it this way if I hadn't spent so much time with the queer writers of yesteryear. But in the way ponn farr drags Spock kicking and screaming back to his home planet and his family's estate--in the way it splits his consciousness so that his 'real' self literally does not know what his ponn-farr-driven self is doing--in the way he experiences it as irresistible yet self-destructive--and especially in the way Spock has tried his damndest to outrun ponn farr until it finally catches up with him--I can't help seeing the coercive power of compulsory heterosexuality, and especially of the obligation to reproduce. Back in the day, it was a common narrative: you left home, you put a lot of distance between yourself and your family, and you lived your queer life for as long as you could until you could no longer stand up to the increasing pressure to come home and get married and start a family, at which point you opened the door to a world of misery for all concerned. Ponn farr renders the social pressure to reproduce as a biological mandate: instead of social death, Spock's punishment for refusing marriage and children will be actual death.    
  
All right, so, I imagine nobody but me is going to buy my little crackpot theory. It is nevertheless undeniably stranger that this biological drive to mate with his arranged wife completely evaporates after Spock--as he believes--kills the man toward whom most of his desires have always been directed. Spock's own explanation for this--"it must have been the combat"--harks back to Kirk's treatment plan for Charlie's hormones in "Charlie X." Kirk's solution to Charlie's crush on Yeoman Rand is to teach him to fight, apparently assuming that the urge toward violence and the urge toward sex are interchangeable and that satisfying one will tame the other.   
  
I believe, however, that it is more complicated than that. If ponn farr does in some way represent the annihilating power of compulsory heterosexuality, then it makes perfect sense that it puts Spock in the position of having to either kill the man he loves or be himself destroyed. What T'Pring is banking on, however--and she turns out to be right--is that the experience of being forced to kill Kirk will neutralize Spock's all-consuming drive to possess her. (Interestingly, she assumes that it will work the same way for Kirk, despite Kirk's reputation as an intergalactic lover of the ladies.) If we follow through with my crackpot theory, what happens at the end of this episode is that compulsory heterosexuality overreaches and thereby undermines its own power. By demanding such a horrible sacrifice, ponn farr--and by extension "all of Vulcan," which as Kirk says is embodied in T'Pao--alienates Spock so profoundly that he no longer has any motivation for complying with what he has up to this point perceived as an irresistible demand. Having (as he believes) lost everything, Spock is now finally free to reject heterosexuality and reproduction. They can offer him nothing and can threaten him with nothing, since--as he believes--he is already dead. When T'Pao says "Live long and prosper, Spock," he replies, "I shall do neither."  
  
All right, that's my crackpot theory and I don't expect it to be persuasive. Here's something a lot simpler: this episode makes it crystal clear that nobody means more to Kirk than Spock does, and vice versa. Each frequently names the other as "my friend," often adding it to some more orthodox description of their relationship (as Spock says, "I have killed my captain...and my friend"). Kirk is willing to choose his "friend" over his female love interest, the Enterprise: "I owe him my life a dozen times over. He's my first officer. He's my friend. Isn't that worth a career?" (Interestingly, Sturgeon is careful to show that honoring his love for Spock does not force Kirk to be morally irresponsible; the Enterprise's appearance at the Altair 6 ceremonies seems super-important to the assholes in Starfleed Command but is not something on which anyone's life or welfare depends.) Spock's "friendship" with Kirk, meanwhile, is so powerful that it can temporarily overcome his "blood fever"; after telling Kirk that Spock won't speak until the madness is over, T'Pao is astonished to see Spock come over and beg her to release Kirk from the challenge ("I will do what I must...but not with him"). And, of course, one of the things this plot engineers is a 'combat' which starts with Spock ripping Kirk's shirt open and ends with the two of them rolling around in the dust clutching each other.   
  
And then, of course, there is the famous moment at which Spock realizes that Kirk is still alive. He grabs Kirk, spins him around, calls him "Jim," and smiles and laughs for the first time...well, for the first time since the happy spores whacked him into love with Leila in "This Side of Paradise." Even more significant to me, watching it now, is how quickly the smile dies when he notices McCoy and Nurse Chapel watching them. What might, if they were alone, have turned into something altogether different now shifts into yet another banter session as Spock--with Kirk's deliberate and expert assistance--rebuilds his 'logical', asexual, non-desiring persona. McCoy can eventually be invited to help with this project, but only after Nurse Chapel has left the room. The scene ends with Spock thanking both Kirk and McCoy for helping him pretend that there was nothing 'emotional' about his response to Kirk's resurrection. Well, actually, it ends with Spock and Kirk going off together, leaving McCoy to smirk and snark to himself alone.  
  
It's a great episode for the Eternal Triangle, and all three actors rise to the challenge. Though you as the viewer know that they're never going to really kill Kirk, Nimoy makes you believe that Spock thinks they have, and that's painful enough. It's true that Nimoy can't do Spock's nervous tremor very convincingly, but so what; he sells you on all the emotional turmoil. Shatner, meanwhile, shows unexpected nuance in his scenes with Spock--especially the combat itself, during which he conveys his bewilderment at finding himself in this situation and his vulnerability. This is what I mean when I say that everyone seems to have been really putting some thought into this one. When offered the lirpa, Spock grips it like a miner picking up a pickaxe; Kirk almost drops his, surprised and alarmed at how heavy it is. He's even more baffled by the second weapon, which he can't even figure out how to use before Spock snags his legs with it. He goes through with it because he can't figure out how not to and because he can't contemplate the altneratives without falling apart. "Kill Spock?" he says, after McCoy comes to shoot him up. "That's not what I came to Vulcan for, is it?"  
  
But the guest stars are great too. There's T'Pau, for instance, who despite being neither young nor tricked out in heinous Theisswear is nevertheless the most impressive and memorable female character they have yet introduced. T'Pring, as cold and mercenary a bitch as she is shown to be, is nevertheless a breath of fresh air. It is true that her part of the plot represents female agency as man-eating; her determination to have the man she's chosen--who, incidentally, wants to be her "consort" instead of wanting her to be his--nearly destroys Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. But she executes her ruthless plan without betraying any emotion or showing even the faintest touch of hysteria. Unlike nearly every other female guest star on this show so far, T'Pring is rational, intelligent, and utterly self-controlled. Apparently all the crazed lust and rage involved in ponn farr happens on the masculine side, because T'Pring--even though she clearly does have some kind of desire for Stonn--doesn't ever seem to be in danger of losing control. Which would of course be par for the course in terms of how this show generally represents the relationship between gender and sexuality. What would appear on the surface to be just another spacebabe manifesting an inexplicable sexual attraction to Kirk turns out to be a calculated move in a 3D chess game that only she knows she's playing--and which, despite McCoy's cheating, she actually wins. Though supposedly driven by her desire for Stonn, in her face, voice, and body T'Pring always appears to be exactly what Spock says she is: "flawlessly logical." Hooray for Vulcan women! Let's see more of 'em!  
  
In fact, this episode would be perfect...if only you could surgically remove Nurse Chapel from it.  
  
Knowing Majel Barrett's relationship to Roddenberry I am inclined to view her scenes as inserted at his insistence. The only other way I can read her insertion into this script is as a craven attempt to straighten Spock out by implying that even when he's not in ponn farr Spock may be secretly turned on by a hot blonde nurse. Either way, the way this episode uses her is just horrendous.   
  
First we have her bringing Spock his special Vulcan plomyk soup--which might be bearable if we didn't have to watch McCoy ragging her about her pathetically hopeless crush on Spock. "And I bet you made it yourself," he says. "You never give up, do you?" McCoy sends her off down the hall where Spock yells at her and throws things. In a conversation with Kirk afterward Spock excuses his conduct by saying that it is "undignified for a woman to play servant to a man who is not hers." Truer words were never spoke, honey badger. I might say it is undignified for her to play servant to _any_ man, but I'm glad to see that you appreciate the pukeworthiness of the gender politics at play here and....wait, WHAT the fuck is she doing in your quarters?   
  
Because once she hears that Kirk is headed to Vulcan, Nurse Chapel sneaks into his quarters, approaches the bed where he's curled up and apparently asleep, hovers there creepily for a while, and is on her way out when Spock wakes up and calls her name. There follows a very strained and awkward exchange in which Spock observes that her face is wet, calls her by her first name, touches her face to wipe away her tears, says that it would be foolish to "deny their feelings," and finally...asks her to make him another bowl of that delicious plomyk soup. To which, with an ecstatic smile, Nurse Chapel enthusiastically assents, causing me to bellow out an enraged, "Oh CHRIST!!"  
  
Dude, what happened to "it is undignified to for a woman to play servant to--" Ah, fuck it.   
  
I mean, I'm glad to see your hair is continuing to improve; but for Christ's sake, Christine, pull yourself together. You may, through doglike and doormatty devotion, get him to allow you to make him soup and bring him his slippers; but when it comes to frenzied rolling around together in the sand, you're not ever gonna compete with That Man On The Bridge.  
  
Ah well. I will admit to replaying the final few minutes of this episode several times. That final reunion still hooks me every time. I've talked a lot elsewhere about the whole crunchy-on-the-outside soft-on-the-inside thing and why that hooks women so much; but more than that, I realize, the reunion scene is a brief but vivid dramatization of a powerful fantasy: finding alive and whole again the beloved you thought you had lost forever.   
  
So thank you, Theodore Sturgeon, for writing this episode. I think it is my favorite. Thank you, cast and crew, for doing everything you did to realize this script's potential. And for God's sake, Gene Roddenberry, if you must insist on including a part for your girlfriend, could you please come up with a way to give her character some fucking dignity?  
  
Up next: "Who Mourns for Adonais?"


	30. WHO MOURNS FOR ADONAIS?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You have to feel for the original fans. They worked so hard to get a Season Two, and it starts off with "Amok Time," and all the Trekkies must have been high-fiving and going, "Oh my God, ALL the episodes this season are going to be SO AWESOME!" And then, next week...they get this.

**STARDATE: November 14, 2011**

**WHO MOURNS FOR ADONAIS?**  
 **Written by Gilbert Ralston**  
  
Sublime, meet ridiculous.

 **The Summary:** As we return to the bridge of the Enterprise, Kirk is getting a report from Hot Yeoman--no, I'm sorry, she's a lieutenant and she has more than one line, so clearly what we have here is a female guest star. Lieutenant Carolyn (I could never catch her last name and she's only listed in the credits as "Carolyn") is reporting to Kirk that like all the other planets in this system, this one they're orbiting appears to have no sentient life. Scotty asks Carolyn to come for a cup of coffee with him, precipitating some gossip between McCoy and Kirk about whether they are or should be an item. This topic becomes less engrossing when a giant green hand appears on the viewing screen, reaching toward the Enterprise as if, as Uhura says, "it means to grab us."  
  
Yes. A giant green hand. In the original trailer it's clear that this is a film of someone's actual hand superimposed on the typical stars-and-planet viewscreen background. In the shiny new remastered version it's a CGI hand. It's brighter green and it glows and it looks much less like an actual human hand because the details are not as sharp. Like I've said before: it's eyelids on a Gorn.  
  
In fact, if I may just take a moment here:  
  
It's been a while since I ranted about the 'improved' special effects on the DVD release. That doesn't mean I've stopped hating them. I'm not alone, either. While viewing "Amok Time," [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) was heard to exclaim, "I HATE CGI!" I hate it too. She's right: it looks fake. It looks more polished and stylized and detailed and perhaps cooler than what happens if you use models and other such optical tricks; but real it is not. More than that, however, the mismatch between the effect and the technology used to achieve it is in itself jarring. Does anyone seriously think that if the original TOS production crew had access to CGI technology, they would have been using it to create giant green spectral hands? The *only* thing that can explain a giant green spectral hand grabbing the Enterprise is the fact that making something look Giant was one of the earliest tricks filmmakers learned to pull off, and was therefore something not only within the capabilities of this production crew but already in the minds of people like Gilbert Ralston who had been exposed to a few decades of film featuring crudely executed giganto-effects. To see a giant green spectral hand executed with 1967-era technology makes some cultural and historical sense. A giant green spectral hand executed with 21st century technology makes no sense whatsoever. I understand they're all bothered by the cheesiness. But since you can't write the giant green hand out of the plot, just leave it the fuck alone. That way at least it has some archival value.   
  
Anyhow. So, this green glowing hand grabs the Enterprise. Spock verifies to the relief of the viewers at home that the thing is an energy field and not a "human appendage." Attempts to bust loose fail. Then, on another scanner, they pick up...a giant spectral head. This giant spectral head is wearing a laurel wreath, and when Uhura puts it on audio, it tells them that it's so glad to see them back, they should all come down to the planet and dance to the sound of the lute, welcome home my children, yada yada yada. Kirk sasses the head back, which leads to the hand 'crushing' the Enterprise until Kirk cries uncle. The giant head invites Kirk and his officers--except for "the one with the pointed ears," who reminds him of Pan--down to the planet to drink the sacred wine and whatnot.   
  
Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, Chekhov (*grits teeth*), and Lt. Carolyn beam down to a neoclassical portico surrounded by trees. There they encounter the guy to whom the giant head and giant hand belong. He's wearing, in addition to the laurel wreath, a ridiculous gold lame drape thing that exposes most of his legs and a large swath of uncannily hairless chest. He informs them that he is Apollo and that he wants them all to worship him and in return he will love them and squeeze them and give them goats to tend. This meets with resistance, especially when Apollo develops the hots for Lt. Carolyn and magically clothes her in a gravity-defying floor-length one-shoulder concoction in hideous glistening pink. (He has also somehow swiped Barbara Eden's Jeanie wig and placed it upon Lt. Carolyn's head.) Scotty charges in like a bull defending his heifer and is zapped by Apollo. Apollo takes Carolyn off to who knows where with him. While Apollo seduces Carolyn by talking about how lonely he is since humans stopped worshipping the gods and all his god and goddess friends disappeared, Kirk tries to calm Scotty down long enough to get him and Chekhov to pinpoint the source of the power that Apollo is obviously using to create his special effects. Kirk's theory now is that the Greek "gods" were actually aliens from a distant planet who just had more advanced technology and were therefore able to extort worship from their credulous pastoral ancestors. McCoy says that Apollo seems to have an "extra organ" which perhaps allows him to channel and manipulate energy.  
  
While Carolyn is falling for her Greek god, Kirk gets busy hatching a plan: since Apollo seems to be drained after an extroardinary use of energy, maybe they can beat him by forcing him to expend energy in all directions. So when Apollo comes back with Carolyn on his arm, Kirk, McCoy, Scotty and Chekhov all start mocking him at once. The idea is that Apollo will zot one of them and the others will jump him while he's weakened. This plan is foiled by Carolyn, who begs Apollo not to harm them. Kirk comes up with a new plan: since Apollo thrives on love and loyalty, why not have Carolyn spurn him and be mean to him and see if that weakens him. Carolyn, of course, doesn't want to do this, but Kirk talks her into it by delivering a speech about human flesh. Apollo and Carolyn disappear again, much to Scotty's consternation.  
  
While all this is going on, honey badger is up on the Enterprise trying to find Apollo's power source, enable communication with the landing party, and fuck up that stupid giant glowing green hand. He and Uhura, his badass honey badger in training, manage to create some holes in the forcefield that they can shoot and communicate through. Not a moment too soon, either, because Carolyn is in fact out there spurning Apollo--and he's pissed. A storm breaks out; finally, when they hear Carolyn screaming, Kirk orders Spock to take out the power source (which is, of course, the same @$! neoclassical thing they've been standing around and sitting on for the entire episode, but which they somehow could not find with their tricorders). Spock fires; it melts. Carolyn returns and is tended to by Scotty. Apollo laments his impending demise, then goes to join his erstwhile immortal friends. Kirk and McCoy express regret that they "had to do that." **END SUMMARY**

  
As [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) said, the premise (discovering that the ancient Greek gods were really extraterrestrials) itself is not _inherently_ bad. In order to make it interesting, however, you'd need a knowledge of Greek literature and culture that goes beyond what you might have absorbed from old Ray Harryhausen movies or from sleeping through Western Civ. And that is precisely what this episode does not have.  
  
Apollo, for instance, has no personality. He's like a statue that has been magically endowed with a deep booming voice. Sure, he's all-powerful and really hung up on being worshipped. But even Charlie X had more character than this guy. He alludes to Pan, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Hercules, etc., but says very little about them. He compares Carolyn to Artemis and then says, right before he Magically Transforms her outfit, "But like Artemis, the bow arm should be bare." Yeah. As if Artemis would be caught DEAD in that Theiss thing. Later on he tells Carolyn that the goddesses were the first to go--Hera, Aphrodite, Athena. Oh really? There's pagans out there STILL worshipping your female colleagues, chief. Maybe Hera et al. didn't dissolve themselves in despair over their lack of human followers. Maybe they just, you know, ditched you.  
  
The human characters are also curiously uninterested in the possibilities of this encounter. You'd think, for instance, that as the god of medicine, he'd be interested in chatting with McCoy about the latest developments; or that, as the god of music, he might want to jam with either Spock or Uhura. And you'd think that someone might want to ask him a few questions--you know, like, "Hey, you know that whole Trojan horse thing? Did that really happen?" or "You know Nietzche's theory about the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music? Is there anything to that?" or, "How do you translate Linear B?" But instead it just becomes another battle of wills between Kirk and an omnipotent adversary, with the added joy of Scott trying to be an alpha dog and Chekhov making his stupid jokes about Russian inwentions.  
  
As for Carolyn...oy.  
  
When the landing party materializes, Carolyn asks McCoy, "What am I doing down here?" Well, sweetheart, based on how this show has treated its women guest stars so far, I can offer you a few guesses about what they want you to do down there:  
  
1) Be fought over.  
2) Wear a fetchingly anachronistic fairy-tale gown.  
3) Betray your male comrades for your new love interest, but then double-cross your new love interest at the last minute.  
4) Completely fail at the profession you supposedly practice.  
5) Almost get raped.  
  
And by God, it all happens. Like Lt. McGivers from "Space Seed," she expresses her supposed interest in "ancient civilizations" mainly by falling for a hot guy who just stepped out of one. Like the brains of hot yeomen before her, Carolyn's brain turns to pudding as soon as she sees how beautiful she is in her fairy princess dress. She doesn't even know enough about her area of expertise to get creeped out when Apollo tells her he's known many women, like Daphne and Cassandra. OK, listen, sweetheart...as with many Greek gods, most of the women Apollo "knew" really didn't want to be known by him. Daphne was so terrified of being raped by Apollo that she turned herself into a fucking tree to get away from him. When, after he gave her the gift of prophecy, Cassandra wouldn't fuck him, Apollo cursed her so that nobody would believe her (sadly accurate) prophecies. You sure you want to be alone in the woods with this guy?  
  
Kirk is no help. Sure, telling Carolyn to "spurn" Apollo makes great tactical sense. A more sensitive commander might have thought one move ahead and asked himself the question: "Given that every time a guy crosses him APollo zaps the crap out of him, what might Apollo do to Carolyn after she spurns him?" But he doesn't. And so after Carolyn does a pretty good job of spurning him--she pretends he's only dating him to study him, and could no more love him than she could love "a new type of bacteria"--what Apollo does is what Greek gods do in that situation: he turns himself into something else and then tries to rape her. By the time Spock fires on the power source, poor Carolyn is flat on her back in the underbrush as storm winds try to rip her clothes off and a huge spectral Apollo looms at her from the cloudy skies. Poor Carolyn. Even Janice never had to get raped by a thunderstorm.  
  
I would be remiss, by the way, if I did not point out that in the opening scene McCoy comments that since Carolyn is "all woman," she will of course eventually marry and leave the service. Of course. Cause she can't serve her husband and Starfleet too, can she? That would be as crazy as...as a giant green glowing spectral hand grabbing the Enterprise. It is nice that Uhura gets to do something technical and complicated and even gets some props from Spock for it. But apart from that, this episode is almost as dismal as "Space Seed" in terms of the gender politics.   
  
"Would it have hurt us," says Kirk elegiacally at the end of the episode, "just to have gathered a few laurel leaves?" Yes. Yes, Kirk, it would. Ancient Greece was not all goats and sacramental wine, my friend. Those gods were BASTARDS. Stop to gather laurel leaves one minute...and before you know it you've killed your father and married your mother and you're eating your kids for lunch in a stew while your wife and her lover plot to kill you in the bathtub. AVOID. AVOID. AVOID.  
  
By the way, in case you were wondering who it is who mourns for Adonais, it's Percy Bysshe Shelley. "Adonais," which uses "O weep for Adonais!" as a refrain, is Shelley's elegy for John Keats. I have tried to read it many times, but I can't; it's just crushingly boring and it goes on forever. Maybe Ralston read it. Then again, maybe he saw the title on a poster in the subway. Ah well. Onward to fresh fields and pastures new.


	31. THE CHANGELING

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our first John Meredyth Lucas episode, and probably the best, though I have a soft spot for "Patterns of Force." It certainly contains the best writing he ever did for Spock, who in other JML episodes is often used as the butt of some pretty annoying humor.
> 
> I was going to say that in this one the gender politics that mar later JML gems like "Elaan of Troiyus" are mercifully absent...and then I remembered what happens to Uhura.

**STARDATE: November 20, 2011**

**THE CHANGELING**  
 **Written by John Meredyth Lucas**  
  
It’s a good thing NOMAD never met Gene Roddenberry.  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise, responding to a distress call from a distant planetary system, discovers that the entire population of 4 billion people has been wiped out along with all other life. They soon sustain an attack from an unknown but hugely powerful assailant which causes everyone on the bridge to throw themselves about most violently. At just about the time they’ve figured out they can’t take another hit, they make contact with the source of all the big zappy things—and discover that it is about 3 feet tall and weighs 500 kg. Kirk contacts it; initially there is some trouble interpreting the response, which is in binary code, but eventually they get in touch and wind up beaming it aboard as an alternative to being blown up by it. They head down to the transporter room and discover an upright boxy metal thing with flashing lights and a vaguely head-shaped top section with antennae (some retractable, one permanent) ‘floating’ on the transporter pad. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty gradually come to the conclusion that it is not (as they previously thought) an alien spacecraft containing very tiny life forms, but an automated probe which identifies itself as NOMAD. It addresses Kirk as its “creator.” Spock figures out—not a moment too soon—that NOMAD has mistaken Kirk for Jackson Roykirk, the “brilliant though erratic” scientist who originally built the probe back in the 2000s. (NOMAD’s memory banks were severely damaged in the meteor shower thought to have destroyed it. This explains the fact that this all-powerful piece of technology is capable of mistaking James T. “Bright Light” Kirk for a “brilliant” scientist with a similar name.) Though NOMAD’s original purpose was to seek out intelligent life, it now seems to understand its mission as detecting and destroying any life form which is imperfect. This category, from NOMAD’s point of view, is presumed to include just about all biological life forms.  
  
Fortunately, NOMAD obeys the commands of “the Kirk,” who it believes created it. Alas, this does not stop it from traveling to the bridge where Uhura is crooning “Beyond Antares” to herself as she works and demanding to know the “purpose” of her singing. Her explanation makes no sense to NOMAD, who attempts to get more data by probing Uhura’s brain. Scott, who is apparently being established as the Enterprise’s white knight, tries to get NOMAD to leave Uhura alone and is zapped across the room. McCoy verifies that Scott is dead. By the time anyone gets around to asking about Uhura, she has been staring vacantly into space for some time; NOMAD’s probe wiped her brain clean. NOMAD, upon learning that The Kirk would like him to repair Scott, accompanies them all to sickbay, where he repairs Scott and brings him back to life. Kirk finally asks NOMAD to repair Uhura; but NOMAD can’t. Scotty was just a hardware problem; but NOMAD initialized Uhura’s hard drive and doesn’t have the necessary software to rebuild it. She will have to be “re-educated” by McCoy and his team using tapes from the ship’s library.  
  
Spock decides that to understand what’s going on with NOMAD he will have to mind-meld with it. Spock’s mind-meld reveals that a) NOMAD was in fact damaged in the meteor shower b) then it collided with a damaged alien space probe whose mission was to collect and sterilize soil samples c) it repaired itself by incorporating elements of the alien probe and d) uh oh NOMAD seems not to want to let go of honey badger’s mind but that’s OK honey badger your beloved captain is here to hold you and call your name or at least the half of it he can pronounce and grab your chest and tell NOMAD to stop fucking with you and help you out into the hall where he continues to grasp you fondly by the shoulders as you finally recover. Spock reports that NOMAD now believes that its mission is to ‘sterilize’ all imperfect life forms. Spock and Kirk observe how much it sucks that NOMAD is now obsessed with returning to its “launch point,” which is Earth, where NOMAD will no doubt instantly realize that it is crawling with imperfect life forms and sterilize the fuck out of it.   
  
Well, when NOMAD travels to engineering and improves the ‘efficiency’ of the warp engines so much that the ship starts doing warp 12, that’s the last straw. Kirk, after getting NOMAD to stop, yells, “It’s time I told you who and what you are! I’m a biological unit, and I created you!”  
  
Oops.  
  
NOMAD decides its needs to ‘re-evaluate’ its relationship with Kirk. NOMAD goes to sickbay, puts Nurse Chapel out of commission, reads The Kirk’s medical records, and becomes even more convinced that it doesn’t need to be listening to THAT bitch any more. But don’t worry, Enterprise. Your captain, though he becomes a moron when angered, also happens to have a black belt in _bullshitsu,_ the little-known martial art of talking a computer into destroying itself.  
  
First Kirk tries what _bullshitsu_ masters call the Reverse Descartes: he asks NOMAD how NOMAD itself could be perfect when he was created by an imperfect biological unit. NOMAD doesn’t go for that; it is quite content to believe that perfection can arise from imperfection. Kirk’s second gambit is to use NOMAD’s ‘prime directive’ against it. After establishing NOMAD’s belief that everything “in error” must be “sterilized,” Kirk points out that he is not in fact Jackson Roykirk or NOMAD’s creator. So, NOMAD made the error, failed to realize it made the error, and failed to correct the error for a triple play; and therefore, NOMAD needs to be sterilized. NOMAD’s voice gets all accelerated and heliummy as it tries to talk this one through. “While it’s thinking,” Kirk, Spock, and Scotty hustle NOMAD into the transporter room (bleating “STERILIZE! STERILIZE!” all the way) and beam the thing into deep space, where it explodes in a beautiful blast of CGI.  
  
Back on the bridge, Spock compliments Kirk on his “dazzling display of logic,” and regrets the destruction of something that came pretty close to artificial intelligence. Kirk mock-laments the loss of such a “bright and promising son.” “You saw what it did for Scotty,” Kirk sighs. “What a doctor it would have made. My son, the doctor. Gets you right here, doesn’t it?” **END SUMMARY**

  
The problem with starting season 2 with “Amok Time” is that it’s gonna a long time before we’re goin’ anywhere but down. “The Changeling” certainly beats the crap out of “Who Mourns for Adonais?” But it ain’t no “Amok Time.” It’s not even an “Operation: Annihilate!”  
  
Let’s get the gender critique out of the way first: this episode could not make the whole male=reason and woman=unreason thing any clearer or any more offensive. NOMAD speaks—before it begins malfunctioning—with a manipulated but still masculine voice. When it attacks Uhura, it’s because it can’t make any sense of her statement that she just “felt like some music.” When it justifies wiping her memory by saying that this ‘unit’ was clearly defective, Spock replies, “That ‘unit’ is a woman.” NOMAD then describes the ‘unit’ he just wiped as a “mass of contradictory impulses.” Evidently the only literary texts left in NOMAD’s memory banks after the collision were all written by Alexander Pope. Not only is all this in itself offensive, but this bit of plotting forces us to watch Uhura—the one woman in the crew who has been, up to this point, generally treated with dignity—lie there in a biobed while Nurse Chapel teaches her how to sound out one-syllable words (in the future, decades’ worth of excellent books for young readers will be wiped out during the Eugenics Wars and beginning readers will once again be stuck with Dick and Jane and Spot and his fucking ball). Though this scene provides one of our few examples of two women helping each other out, and though it does give us the chance to see Uhura speak Swahili, this scene also puts her in the humiliating position of being both re-educated and re-parented by her (now much smarter, relative to her) white colleagues, and the whole thing just gives you the heaves. And that’s before you ask the question [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/)**lizaetal** asked at this point in the episode: “Yeah, they can re-educate her—but will she be the same person?” If NOMAD is way too anthropomorphized—when it’s arguing with Kirk, you can actually hear its irritation, and Spock complains that it manifests an “almost human stubbornness”—in Uhura’s part of the plot you see the writers treating her brain as if it is no different from any other data storage device. Sure, she crashed and we had to reinstall Windows, but hey, she’s good as new now!  
  
(If computers were really so perfect that they could afford to go around destroying everything that was in error, Microsoft Corporation would just be a smear of greasy ash right now. But I digress.)  
  
More interesting, perhaps, is the fact that when Kirk finally figures out what’s going on with NOMAD, what he says is, “It thinks I’m it’s mother.” He goes back to the idea of being NOMAD’s “mother” in the final banter. This is interesting given that NOMAD always refers to Kirk as “the creator,” which you’d think would lead Kirk to identify as NOMAD’s (God the) father. This is, of course, not the first time that a plot has thrown a child at Kirk and forced him to parent it. The most obvious example is “Charlie X,” but something similar happens in “Miri” (though his role as Miri’s surrogate parent is ickily inseparable from his role as her first love object) and even to some extent in “Squire of Gothos,” where Kirk assumes the role of disciplinarian relative to the spoiled brat Trelayne. But this is the first time it’s marked as a maternal rather than a paternal relationship. Perhaps this is because NOMAD, being a machine, does not have an adolescent sexuality for Kirk to help it navigate. Either way, I will cop to feeling a twinge of maternal solidarity as I watched NOMAD sailing down the corridor away from Kirk as he shouts for it to stop and come back. I’ve been there. Oh yes. I’ve been there.  
  
The “child” motif is carried through in Kirk’s explanation of the title; after Spock describes how NOMAD rebuilt itself to include elements of the alien probe, Kirk explains that a “changeling” is a fairy child that takes the place of a human child. In fact, what happens with NOMAD and the alien probe is more complicated than that. NOMAD consistently refers to the alien probe as “the Other,” which just pushes every last one of my postcolonial theory buttons. In fact NOMAD is not so much a changeling as a hybrid; it may think it’s absorbed the alien Other, but it’d be at least as accurate to say that the alien Other has invaded it. Although each probe, individually, is harmless and benign, when you merge them they become an Unstoppable Extinction Machine. Us + Other=4 billion people dead. Hey, maybe this seeking out new life and new civilizations things has a dark side! Who’d have thought?  
  
In fact, if you will allow me a Crackpot Theory Moment, NOMAD functions as a changeling of the Enterprise itself. Its explicitly genocidal determination to eliminate “imperfect” life forms makes it the concrete embodiment of a particularly ruthless kind of imperialism which one always fears to find lurking behind the much softer “explore strange new worlds” rhetoric. As they contemplate NOMAD’s return to Earth, Kirk bitterly remarks that it will carry out its “prime directive”—a directive perhaps best summed up, at this point, as “EXTERMINATE THE BRUTES!” When Kirk first dredges up some memories of lectures at the Academy on NOMAD, he says, “From what I remember, its mission was essentially peaceful.” All this makes NOMAD the Enterprise’s dark doppelganger—its evil twin, if you will.  
  
But of course, much of the entertainment value of “The Changeling” derives from watching them try to make that thing look like it can hover. Much of the time the very tippy top of NOMAD is deliberately kept out of shot so you can’t see what it’s attached to. It’s also pretty obvious when they’re editing NOMAD’s trips down the corridor for the sole purpose of concealing the moments where they had to stop and manually pass the string over a boom mike or something. Spock has some nice moments. His response to Kirk’s “I’m a biological unit” gaffe is understated yet priceless; and this time, in the final banter, the joke gets to be on Kirk:  
  
 **SPOCK: …a dazzling display of logic.**  
 **KIRK: You didn’t think I had it in me, did you?**  
 **SPOCK: No, sir.**  
  
Ah well… “Mirror Mirror” is up next. Doppelgangers galore!


	32. MIRROR, MIRROR

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pretty much full-on awesomeness from Jerome Bixby, another _Twilight Zone_ veteran. This episode was also mined in later Treks (there's a DS9 Mirrorverse episode, at least...I kind of lost interest halfway through Voyager) and no doubt the reboot will get there eventually if the series is continued long enough.
> 
> By the way, the reason I keep commenting on the appearance of the green-and-gold wrap tunic that Kirk sometimes sports is because of [this.](http://i912.photobucket.com/albums/ac326/tribbleattack/wrapmacro.jpg) I did not create that. I don't know who did. All I know is that as soon as I found it it became my favorite internet thing ever.

**STARDATE: November 21, 2011**

**MIRROR, MIRROR**  
 **By Jerome Bixby**  
  
Now THIS is how you do a parallel-universe episode.  
  
 **The Summary:** Kirk, Scotty, McCoy, and Uhura are down on a planet with a lovely violet sky, talking to some humanoids in vaguely Greek-like tunics, each with a blue dot on his forehead. These “Hulcanians” are sitting on a fortune in dilithium crystals, but despite Kirk’s best efforts they refuse to allow the Federation to mine them. They believe the Federation’s PR about being peaceful; but they know things change, and they don’t want their dilithium crystals being used for violent purposes, since as a planet they are all committed to “total peace.” Kirk says he respects this and hopes to convince them that their dilithium will be safe with him; but there’s an ion storm a-brewing, so Kirk decides to beam everyone up while the Hulcanian council deliberates further. Well, there’s only one reason to put an “ion storm” in your Star Trek script: because you need to catastrohpically fuck up the Enterprise’s equipment. Sure enough, after an unusually dicey beam-up, Kirk et al. finally materialize on the transporter pad—and discover that Spock has a goatee, his insignia are wack, he’s giving a modified fascist salute, there’s a graphic on the wall showing Earth with a huge dagger hilt sticking out of it, and they themselves are dressed like disco pirates. WHAT’S GOING ON?  
  
Well, it doesn’t take them too long to figure out (as they reconnoiter in sickbay on pretense of getting McCoy to ‘examine’ them) that the ion storm sent them through the boundary between two parallel universes and right into an alternate-universe Enterprise populated entirely by ruthless cutthroat SOBs and serving an “empire” which rules by terror. They immediately set about trying to figure out how to get back to their own universe; Scotty will have to do some of that engineering stuff to the transporters, assisted by McCoy (“I’m a doctor, not an engineer.” “Now you’re an engineer”) while Uhura works as their mole on the bridge. The empire, of course, wants the Hulcanians incinerated because of their refusal to allow them to mine there. Kirk manages to buy a 12-hour delay, but at the cost of exciting the suspicions of Mirror Sulu—now a very unsavory character with a huge dueling scar—and the ambitions of Mirror Chekhov, who attempts to ambush and assassinate Kirk in a corridor. The plot is foiled when some of Mirror Chekhov’s own confederates turn on him in an effort to curry favor with Kirk; Mirror Chekhov is sent to the “agony booth” to be tortured. (I nominate this episode for Least Annoying Use of Chekhov in Season 2. Alas, when Kirk discovers what this involves, he orders Mirror Chekhov confined to quarters after a disappointingly brief session.) Returning to his quarters, Kirk discovers a sultry brunette named Marlene lounging on his bed. When Mirror Spock calls to tip Kirk off to the fact that the empire has ordered him to kill Kirk if he doesn’t vaporize the Hulcanians at dawn tomorrow, Marlene reveals that Kirk’s quarters are outfitted with “the Tantalus Device”—which not only allows Kirk to monitor anyone on the ship but to instantly vaporize anyone by pressing a green button. Marlene then slips into something more comfortable; but alas, Kirk is supposed to be in the transporter room in 10 minutes to help with the escape plan, and his attempts to put her off precipitate what she clearly believes is their breakup fight. Kirk finally tells her that “you’re the Captain’s woman until he says you’re not” and escapes, leaving Marlene in his quarters.  
  
Up on the bridge, Uhura’s job is to “distract” Mirror Sulu so that he doesn’t notice the warning lights going off as Scotty does his thing. Her distraction of Sulu is not only her best scene to date but probably the hottest thing that ever happened on the bridge of any Enterprise. When she knows it’s safe, she cracks Sulu across the face, says she’s changed her mind again, and backs out of the bridge keeping everyone else at bay with the dagger she’s been carrying around in her hipboot all this time. Look who’s badass now!  
  
Sadly, Mirror Spock apprehends Kirk in the act of trying to do whatever it is he’s supposed to be doing in the transporter room. Mirror Spock marches Kirk back to sickbay, where the rest of the landing party has reconnoitered. Mirror Spock demands answers; instead, Kirk jumps him, and we are treated to the sight of Mirror Honey Badger single handedly holding his own against Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and McCoy—until Uhura hands Kirk a heavy object to smash over Mirror Spock’s head. This not only knocks Mirror Spock out but puts him, apparently, in mortal danger, which means that McCoy has to treat him even though they’ve only got 10 minutes to get the hell out. To make matters worse, Mirror Sulu and a few of his goons show up. Mirror Sulu’s plan is to kill Mirror Spock and Kirk and take command of the Enterprise. Just as he’s done chortling, however, Marlene (who is back in Kirk’s quarters watching on the Tantalus Device) zaps Mirror Sulu’s goons into oblivion. Mirror Sulu himself is quickly put out of commission. McCoy’s still treating Mirror Spock, so Kirk, Uhura, and Scotty run down to the transporter room—where they find Marlene, who wants to go with them. Well, she can’t; they’ve only got the energy for four beam-overs, not five. She pulls a phaser on them; but the newly badass Uhura, who doesn’t want to stay in this fucked-up universe a nanosecond longer than necessary, attacks and disarms her. Now we discover that the automatic setting has been disabled, which means someone will have to stay behind and operate the transporter. Kirk nobly agrees to do this, fretting less about being stuck in the Mirrorverse (hey, at least he’ll still have his ‘woman’ and be able to kill by remote control) than about the nonappearance of McCoy.   
  
Where’s McCoy? Well, McCoy is in sickbay on the wrong end of a Vulcan mind-meld. See, Spock regained consciousness, demanded to know why McCoy was saving his life, and then backed McCoy against a wall while saying with malicious relish, “Our minds are one…I feel what you feel…I know what you know.” McCoy has this look on his face which could either be Pure Terror or But Spock, This Is All So Sudden!  
  
Spock and McCoy come through. Spock decides to send them all back. Kirk comments that Spock is a “man of integrity in both universes;” Spock says he needs his own captain back. (It’s OK, Mirror Honey Badger. We understand.) Before getting back on the transporter pad, however, Kirk tries out some of his _bullshitsu_ moves on Mirror Spock. Kirk tries to convince Mirror Spock that it is illogical for him to be serving an empire whose own methods doom it to collapse and that it would be more logical for him to work to undermine it. When Spock points out that to do that he’d need power, Kirk tells him about the Tantalus Device. Kirk runs back to the transporter pad still blathering about revolution. Spock promises to “consider it” as he energizes.  
  
And whew! They’re back on their own Enterprise, and the Mirror versions of themselves are back on their own Enterprise (though exactly how that happens is never really explained). What a relief! Back on the bridge, some insults are traded (the humans getting the worst end of the stick) and all of a sudden Marlene walks by. Of course she has no idea why Kirk is staring at her. Spock has some idea, but Kirk denies everything, claiming that he was only interested in her because she seems like a nice enough girl and maybe they could be “friends.” Spock’s eyebrow is skeptical. Kirk goes over to talk to her about something as the credits roll. **END SUMMARY**  
  
You know, once you buy into the whole parallel-universe thing, and once you get over your irritation at the fact that Roddenberry has finally realized what is apparently a lifelong dream of turning the Enterprise into a pirate ship, this episode has a lot going for it. Theiss may have dressed them all like pirates; but in terms of how people behave, the Mirror Enterprise is more like either a totalitarian state or a military dictatorship. (Kirk Classic is sporting his green and gold wrap tunic in the opening scenes, and Mirror Kirk’s uniform features a wraparound gold vest, so Kirk is wonderously wrapped wherever he goes.) Jerome Bixby, who wrote the story for the _Twilight Zone_ episode “It’s a Good Life,” is used to this whole pretending-not-to-be-freaked-out-by-an-alien-yet-familiar-world thing, and he makes watching the characters try to negotiate the Mirrorverse consistently interesting. The main conceit, which allows the characters to do things they would otherwise never get to do, is liberating for many of them, especially Uhura. I suppose I ought to be annoyed by the fact that Uhura’s being used a sexual object; but given how little she has gotten to do so far, and especially compared to what she had to do in “The Changeling,” it’s clearly a major step forward for the character. Nichols has to take a lot of the credit for that. When Kirk lays out Uhura’s role in the escape plan, she falters on her way out and says, “Captain, I’m…” Now you know—you just KNOW—that her next word was supposed to be “frightened;” but she doesn’t actually say it. Instead Kirk comes over and tells her, “Lieutenant…you’re the only one who can do it,” and off she goes to do it. In my own private unauthorized biography of this show, I can see Nichols doing this scene 50 times, always refusing to utter the word “frightened,” until at last in desperation Marc Daniels agrees to just move on already. But we don’t need my fantasy world for evidence of Nichols’s awesomeness. After initially holding a menacing Sulu at bay, she comes back to him later to create her ‘diversion.’ She does the whole seduction while toying with that crazy stylus as if it's a dagger. The dialogue’s not exactly innovative, but Nichols herself is legitimately mesmerizing—and not just because of her bared abs. (Apparently there was a thing about the network execs not wanting to show Uhura’s bellybutton. Bjo Trimble, in the Season 2 featurette, claims that she saved Uhura’s bellybutton for our delectation by taking the quality control person out to lunch while the relevant scenes were being shot.) She and Sulu, by the way, don’t actually kiss—she has to keep her eye on the warning lights on his panel—so this does not pre-empt her big moment with Kirk in “Plato’s Stepchildren;” but it is interesting that an African-American/Asian-American clinch did not apparently push anyone’s ‘OMG interracial’ buttons. It’s also gratifying—and most unexpected—to see her take Marlene down in the transporter room, even if she is ‘only’ another woman.   
  
It’s the kind of episode that could really work only at this point in the show, when the viewers are attached to the characters as they are. It is interesting that of the four displaced persons, Kirk fits most easily into the Mirrorverse. He has no trouble simulating autocratic contempt, and he takes quite readily to the whole “captain’s woman” thing. His scene with Marlene in his quarters is, I think, supposed to impress us with his virtues—he tells her that he believes she “could be anything you want to be,” which I assume is meant to imply that she doesn’t or shouldn’t have to waste her talents on becoming someone’s “woman,” and Marlene mentions him “showing mercy” to her. However, because her main concern is that her captain is tired of her and is about to cast her off, this “mercy” takes the form of making out with her—so Kirk gets to manhandle his hot subordinate and have that be noble. But of all the characters, Mirror Marlene gets the most raw deal—unless we are to assume that she’s going to become Spock’s woman now that she’s the only one who can show him where the Tantalus device is. Even when it looks like Kirk won’t be able to go back over, he doesn’t offer Marlene the extra spot—which, since she’s probably going to wind up killed if she stays behind, is pretty cold. (And by the way—since Marlene has free access to Kirk’s quarters and knows how to use this secret device, why isn’t SHE working on some diabolical plan to assassinate him and seize control of the ship?) Kirk’s response to the Marlene in his universe, meanwhile, is so weird and awkward one doesn’t even know how to read it.   
  
There’s some very interesting stuff with Mirror Spock, who like Spock Classic appears to be more loyal to ‘his’ captain than circumstances would warrant—but who unlike Spock Classic has no problem letting Kirk know that when the shit hits the fan, honey badger looks out for honey badger. Mirror Spock’s loyalty is explained ‘logically’ by his expressed desire NOT to become captain and walk around with a target on his back. But when Kirk assures Mirror Spock that Spock will find him a “formidable enemy,” Mirror Spock assures Kirk of “the reverse.” Mirror Spock shuts down Mirror Sulu’s first power play by saying that in the event of Mirror Spock’s untimely demise, his own goons will avenge his death…and “some of them are Vulcans.” Nimoy seems to enjoy Mirror Spock, especially in his interactions with McCoy. I particularly relish the mind-meld, during which Mirror Spock says exactly what Spock Classic always says during a mind-meld, but makes it chilling. Thumbs up to DeForest Kelly too for the wide-eyed speechless terror with which he reacts to all this. And of course, during the fight scene, Mirror Spock gets to pound the crap out of both Kirk and McCoy—something that Nimoy must have enjoyed, at least at the moments when everyone wasn’t being played by stunt doubles. Mirror Spock’s response to Kirk’s second “dazzling display of logic” in as many episodes is both in character—Mirror Spock is under no delusions about how effective terror is as a policy in the long term—and out of character in all the right ways (Mirror Spock seems very interested in this ‘device’ that will make him ‘invincible’ and is perfectly willing to consider assassinating ‘his’ captain).  
  
The fact that Mirror Spock is open to Kirk’s final argument is in itself interesting. This plot makes an unusually explicit argument for peace, justice, and ethical behavior in general as utilitarian—as the logical and pragmatic choice—rather than as an ideal to be pursued because it’s the Right Thing To Do. The Mirror Enterprise is shown to be a chaotic and woefully inefficient operation; with the officers constantly plotting to assassinate each other and the crew constantly subjected to agonizing torment, it’s amazing anything gets done. Mirror Sulu makes it clear that unless Kirk is there to enforce compliance, he’s happy to spend his time flirting and dueling and generally not doing his job. The constant surveillance only fuels all the plotting and treachery. Despite their extra ruthlessness, the  Mirror crew cannot get the Hulcanians to comply any more than Classic Kirk could; all they can do is mete out punishment. They will, of course, get the dilithium crystals. But the Hulcanians predict that making them an “example” will hasten revolt against the empire, and Mirror Spock confirms this. When Kirk asks Mirror Spock how long it will be before the empire falls, he has the exact time span already computed. Clearly he’s thought about this before.  
  
There are some nice moments for Spock Classic as well. When Kirk et al. wonder what the Mirror versions of themselves are doing over on their Enterprise, we get a brief yet satisfying answer: a shot of Mirror Kirk being hauled by Spock and a couple security guys to the brig already containing his Mirror officers. After roaring, "What kind of a uniform is this?" while tugging at his WOnderous Wrap, Mirror Kirk does his best to bluster and bribe Spock into cooperating with him; initially Spock finds all this merely “interesting,” but when Kirk yells, “What is it that will buy you?” down the hall at him as he’s walking away, Spock upgrades the situation to “fascinating.” It’s too bad we don’t get to see more of Mirror Uhura and Mirror Bones, though. Mirror Scotty I don’t think would be all that different, apart from maybe having a super-fierce kilt.  
  
With all this in mind it is interesting that we never find out whether the Hulcanians change their minds about letting the Federation mine there—or whether Kirk Classic is willing, at last, to take no for answer. In the opening scene, the head Hulcanian says, “You have the might to take the crystals by force.” Kirk responds, “But we won’t. Consider that as well.” Still, it appears from the final shot of the Enterprise that they’re still orbiting the planet at the end of the episode. How much ‘peaceful’ pressure is Kirk going to put on the Hulcanians before he finally takes the ship out of orbit?  
  
  
I guess I was wrong; this season DOES have somewhere to go other than down! So, up next…hmm…looks like… “The Apple.  
  
NooooOOOOOOooo!!!!


	33. THE APPLE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Continuing to give the original fans whiplash, they follow up "Mirror, Mirror" with an episode that has to feature on any Trekkie's Worst Ever shortlist.

**STARDATE: November 26, 2011**

**THE APPLE**  
 **Written by Max Ehrlich**  
  
Talk about your bad apples.  
  
 **The Summary:** Kirk, Spock, Chekhov, McCoy, Hot YeomanXP (her first name is Marta; Kirk never deigns to address her by name so I don’t know her last one), and an ominously large number of redshirts are scouting out a newly discovered planet. Everyone keeps talking about how beautiful it is and how much they love being out in nature, which is a shame since they are clearly on a soundstage covered with unconvincing faux and potted foliage. Everyone keeps talking about how it’s like paradise…until one of the redshirts spots a day lily turning in his direction and takes a fistful of poison pollen spikes in the chest. He’s dead, Jim. Then Spock discovers a lot of rocks lying around which have “unusually low specific gravity”—which, translated means, “they look like rocks but they’re as light as Styrofoam”—and are made of lots of interesting minerals and might make an effective power source. He casually tosses one away…and it blows up on impact. All right, so, everyone look out for the exploding rocks. Spock notices that they are being watched and followed by one of the inhabitants. He also notices that one of the Daffodils of Death has Kirk in its sights, and pushes Kirk out of the way only to take a chestful of spores himself. McCoy is ultimately able to revive him. As Kirk gets more and more nervous about all this—oh, did I mention the Enterprise is in peril? Well, it is—he finally flushes the inhabitant out of the bushes and punches him right in the face. The inhabitant--who like all his kind sports unnaturally poufy white hair, a deep orange spray-tan, a loincloth, modified espadrilles, and some strange white facial decorations--bursts into tears. Kirk promises not to hurt him. Akuta, for that is his name, identifies himself as the eyes and ears of Vaal. Vaal, of course, is their god; and when he finally takes the landing party to this village they’re all looking for, they find out that Vaal keeps them all healthy and happy and apparently immortal. There are some catches: 1) They have to feed Vaal those dangerously combustible rocks on a regular basis. 2) They are forbidden to have children because 3) they are forbidden to have sex. Of course, at the next feeding time, the landing party discovers that Vaal is in fact a machine with an enormous power source which is accessed via a giant ‘stone’ carving that looks like the open maw of a venomous snake and has big glowing green and yellow eyes. Vaal is protected by a forcefield (as Spock discovers rather painfully when he tries to get a closer look). But they’re gonna have to get in there somehow, because Vaal is the gateway to a power source which is now well and truly fucking up the Enterprise; the matter/antimatter whatsits have been totally drained and a tractor beam is pulling the ship inexorably into the atmosphere.   
  
Unfortunately—for many reasons—the plot sort of takes a holiday at this point as the landing party enjoys the Vaalians’ hospitality and waits for the next feeding time. This allows us time for some just craptastic byplay involving Hot YeomanXP, who sets a new standard for uselessness, stupidity, and general annoying behavior. Hot YeomanXP and Chekhov, who as Kirk says “find one another fascinating,” sneak off to make out in the twilight and are observed by two Vaalian youth (male and female, of course) who then decide to try out this whole nookie thing themselves. They are caught in the act by Akuta, who soon receives new instructions from Vaal. He calls the men of Vaal together and explains that Vaal wants them to kill the newcomers. They, of course, have never done this before; but Akuta demonstrates with a club and a melon. The attack is foiled—the one redeeming feature about Hot YeomanXP is that she does actually fight, and is capable of throwing a guy—and the Vaalians are put under hut arrest. With the Vaalians being prevented from feeding him, and the Enterprise under Scotty’s direction fighting the tractor beam, and the energy Vaal used up creating a storm with which to have Spock struck by lightning, Vaal’s defenses are weakening enough that Scotty can lock phasers on the big snake head and zap the forcefield long enough to cause immense power drain and eventually, inevitably, cause Vaal’s head to blow up.  
  
So, Kirk tells the Vaalians all about how awesome it will be now that they have to work and have sex and reproduce and figure out how to deal with freedom “with our help” and back up they go to the ship, where McCoy and Spock continue their argument about whether getting rid of Vaal was ethically defensible or not. Kirk joins them and…well, this final banter is so bad I’ll be dissing it—I mean discussing it—below, so for now let me just say: **END SUMMARY**

  
Wow, that episode SUCKED.   
  
In fact, I’m surprised nobody nominated it for the [Spock’s Brain](http://www.plaidder.com/spocks.htm) awards back in the day. I would put this up against “And the Children Shall Lead”—and probably even “The Omega Glory”—in any badness competition. It may be that people just had “The Apple” confused in their minds with some other bad episode. Indeed, one of the things that makes this episode so bad is how it’s almost all stolen from earlier Star Trek episodes. You have a childlike but potentially extremely old group of people living on a paradise-like garden planet who have to be initiated into both sexuality and capitalism when the all-powerful god they’ve been worshipping is finally revealed to be a machine which has to be neutralized because it’s trying to kill the Enterprise. It’s like “This Side of Paradise” and “Return of the Archons” got drunk on sacramental wine they stole from “Who Mourns for Adonais?” and decided to go down the hall and wake up “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and “Miri” and then after the smoke cleared the next morning there was this new episode lying there among the plastic tumblers and nobody could remember how it got there.  
  
When Max Ehrlich tries to add new ingredients to this stew, it only gets worse. The Edenic parallels are applied with an extra-big sledgehammer. After Spock discovers the exploding rocks, Kirk looks dramatically into the distance and says to no one in particular, “Paradise…with land mines.” The ongoing argument between McCoy and Spock about whether destroying Vaal violates the prime directive is rendered more pukeworthy by the recognizably Polynesian setting. OK, we know it’s not **really** Hawaii. But it’s a lush tropical paradise, the inhabitants ritually feed a giant open mouth whose gullet seems to lead straight into the fiery center of the planet, and newcomers are welcomed with flower garlands. Perhaps someone on the team realized this and decided to draw a distinction between this episode and cheesy 1950s B-movies about Hawaii by making the Vaalians supernaturally white. This doesn’t change the fact, however, that the faux-Hawaiian setting makes the rhetoric spouted by McCoy and later Kirk about how this society is “stagnant” because it’s not “growing” because Vaal is fulfilling their wants and needs roil my stomach extra-hard. Cause that’s exactly what the American colonists said about Hawaii. Jeez, these people are living in a paradise where you can grow anything—and all they’re doing is growing _food!_ Don’t they realize we—I mean they—could make millions of dollars planting sugar cane here where all this taro is growing? Look at all these lazy people just sitting around sustaining themselves and their families when we could come in here and replace all this unsaleable crap with cash crops and DO something with this place! And, OK, maybe there’ll be famine, cause taro’s their food staple and people can’t really survive on sugar cane, which we’re exporting anyway…but the economy will be GROWING!   
  
But of course our heroes are saved from making such an obviously calculating decision by the fact that the “stagnation” of a sustainable economy is literalized through Vaal’s apparently arbitrary prohibition on sex and reproduction. The reason for this dictum is never explained; one might assume that since nobody apparently dies here Vaal is worried about overcrowding, but since there only seem to be about 30 Vaalians on the whole planet, they don’t seem to be in any danger of this. But of course no self-respecting human could allow people to go on serving a ‘god’ who not only is not a god but won’t allow them either sexual or reproductive freedom. And then of course Vaal is trying to kill the Enterprise. So they have plenty of other reasons to destroy Vaal, and are not put in the position of having to admit that they’re “liberating” the Vaalians just because they can’t accept the possibility that a society that doesn’t work or “grow” or own property or make money might have a right to be left alone.  
  
Oh, you, I hear you say. Always with the anti-imperialist critique. Do you really think anyone cares? Well, no, of course not; but I would humbly point out that the prohibition on sex—which, as I say, provides the necessary cover for Kirk’s otherwise coldly capitalist intervention—is responsible for some of the worst writing in this episode. There’s a scene which I believe was intended to be funny in which Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Chekhov, and Hot YeomanXP are sitting around in the hut talking about the Vaalians. To keep Hot YeomanXP’s mind off events—like many a HY before her, when she talks it’s mainly to express anxiety or fear—Kirk asks her what she thinks would happen if one of the Vaalians died by accident. She says she can’t see how they would create the “replacement,” because they don’t seem to…and she’s not allowed to actually say what she means, but clearly the implication is that they don’t know how sex or reproduction work, and so she wonders, “How is it done?” There is then all this byplay about getting someone to “explain to the young lady”—as if _she_ doesn’t know how babies are made—and then Spock says that he’s sure they would receive the “necessary instructions” from Vaal. The whole thing seems to be built around the male officers sort of chortling to each other as they try not to explicitly talk about sex in front of the “young lady.” It’s pukeworthy—all the more so since Hot YeomanXP is clearly well aware of how babies are made. She’s the one who responds to the discovery that there are no children—or as they call them, “replacements”—in Vaalian society by saying, “But when a man and a woman fall in love…” You see what I mean? Pukeworthy. Of course this is all part of the Eden paradigm too—the innocence before the fall, etc. etc. etc.—but I always figured that in Eden, Adam and Eve knew about sex and were having plenty. They just didn’t ‘know enough’ to be ashamed of it.   
  
Anyway. Political pukeworthiness is only one of this episode’s many problems. The other big one is that the characterization is noticeably off. Ehrlich appears to have been told all the rules, but can only follow them in a crude and distorting way. For instance, Ehrlich must have known about Roddenberry’s idea of Kirk as Hamlet, because after one of the redshirt deaths Kirk goes off into an anguished soliloquy about how he’s responsible for all these crew deaths and he shouldn’t have carried on the mission and it’s all his fault for liking “the smell of growing things” and you can almost literally see him wringing his hands. It’s bizarrely unmotivated—since when has Kirk ever grieved, or even paused, over a redshirt death?—and it forces Shatner to shift suddenly into Melodrama Mode in a way which is positively surreal. Spock is stuck talking him down by reminding him what an awesome captain he is. Even the McCoy/Spock conflict over the prime directive—during which Spock makes some good and long-overdue points about how humans are a minority in the galaxy and McCoy’s determination to judge everything by human standards is benighted—is overdrawn; Spock comes off as an irritating prig and McCoy as a petulant child. There’s also an argument between Spock and Kirk after Spock saves Kirk’s life by pushing him out of the way of the Death Spores, in which Kirk tells Spock not to be so heroic and put himself unnecessarily in harm’s way—which, again, makes a huge deal out of something that both Kirk and Spock typically accept as normal.   
  
Ehrlich even manages to fuck up the final banter. When Kirk encounters Spock and McCoy in mid-fight, Spock is in the middle of explaining that if we read the encounter on Vaal as an allegory of the book of Genesis (No. Really? There’s a Garden of Eden thing going on here? OMG, I as the viewer would so totally NEVER HAVE KNOWN THAT if Spock hadn’t pointed it out) then the Vaalians are Adam and Eve, this ‘freedom’ they’ve now been given is the apple, and that would make the Enterprise…So Kirk gets all mock umbragey about Spock casting him in the role of Satan, and then says hey, do we know anyone on the Enterprise who looks even remotely like Satan? And that stupid “humor” music plays as McCoy and Kirk look at Spock’s ears. Spock says no, and they all walk off, Kirk smugly smirking all the way.  
  
Why is that fucked up? Because up to this point, mocking Spock for the ways in which he’s physically different from humans—the pointy ears, the green blood—is something that has always been recognized by the writers as a bigoted thing to do. McCoy’s “pointy-eared” and “green-blooded” cracks are used to indicate an “old-fashioned” hatred of difference which seems to be of a piece with McCoy’s off-again on-again Southern accent and “little old country doctor” persona. Part of McCoy’s character arc so far has been developing a respect for Spock which, because it is rather grudgingly mutual, has allowed the two of them to make this knee-jerk bigotry part of a ritualized game of insults that both can enjoy. But it is just as important to Kirk’s character, and to the whole system of triangular relationships, that Kirk does _not_ taunt Spock on the basis of his biology. In fact, whenever you do see Kirk doing that, it’s because Kirk is deliberately **not** being himself. In “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” Kirk deliberately implants the term “half-breed” into his android double’s brain precisely in order to tip Spock off to the fact that the thing he’s talking to is _not_ his captain. In “This Side of Paradise” Kirk taunts Spock about his “elf” ears precisely because he knows Spock will find that hurtful and offensive. In “Mirror, Mirror,” Mirror Kirk threatens to hang Spock Classic up by his “Vulcan ears.” Kirk does, of course, tease Spock about his _emotional_ differences—usually because he’s trying to get Spock to admit that he’s not in fact as different as he pretends to be. But the fact that Kirk is not impressed one way or another by Spock’s visible difference is one of the things that explains Spock’s loyalty to him and makes the intimacy between them that you see in, for instance, “Amok Time” credible.   
  
So what does Ehrlich do? Have Kirk not only mock Spock’s ears but imply that they make him Satan.   
  
This is in keeping with the fact that the script in general seems to hate Spock. While the redshirts drop like flies, poor honey badger is kept alive to be 1) shot full of death pollen 2) thrown across the glade by a forcefield and 3) struck by lightning.  Kirk’s gratuitous chewing-out of Spock for taking the Darts of Death on his behalf is most easily read as Kirk as trying to push away a loyalty that he finds oppressive because he doesn’t reciprocate it.   
  
There are only two things about this episode that are interesting in a good way. One is Scotty’s part. Ehrlich, no doubt on Roddenberry’s orders, dutifully puts the Enterprise in peril, and Scotty’s the one stuck trying to save it. Kirk’s interactions with Scotty are much more involving than his interactions with Spock or McCoy; both try to deflect their obvious emotional investment in the ship itself (and each other) by pretending that what’s really at stake is Scotty’s job (Kirk says that if Scotty can’t save the ship, he’ll be fired; when it looks like the Enterprise is doomed, Scotty says, “I guess you’ll have to fire me, sir;” Kirk does fire him, but then once the Enterprise is able to break the hold, he rehires him eagerly). There is real tension and urgency and one does actually feel good when they finally solve the problem. Note to Max Ehrlich: When your execution of Roddenberry’s bullshit Peril Provision is the best part of your episode, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.  
  
The other interesting thing only lasts about a second and I am convinced that it was introduced purely by the director, Jospeh Pevney. Pevney was at the helm on “Amok Time” and “City on the Edge of Forever” as well as “Arena,” “Return of the Archons,” “Devil in the Dark,” and “A Taste of Armageddon.”  So Ehrlich didn’t get Kirk/Spock; but Pevney certainly must have. For that reason, I find it interesting that when Kirk helps Spock up after Vaal’s forcefield tosses him through the air, there is a weirdly brief and, plotwise, completely unnecessary shot of Chekhov and Hot YeomanXP giving each other Knowing Looks accompanied by a shared smirk. Since Chekhov and HYXP are a couple, the most obvious interpretation of this—indeed, the only interpretation I can come up with—is as a moment of recognition: as Kirk touches Spock and Spock lets him do it, they perceive the Secret Romance between their captain and his first officer, and though of course they don’t dare say anything they are silently commenting on it to each other. Since there’s no dialogue, it’s possible and indeed likely that this shot was not indicated by the script—it’s never followed up and as I said there is no reason, either in terms of plot or in terms of storytelling, that it has to be there. But it does lead the viewer to retroactively re-read the earlier dustup over Spock’s heroism on Kirk’s behalf as an attempt to publicly disavow exactly the kind of intimacy that Chekhov and HYXP seem to be privately commenting on in that shot.   
  
You know, I talk about Kirk/Spock as if it's something anyone would have to see in there; but I would always have said when pressed that it was neither intentional nor canonical. But that one little shot does make me wonder what Pevney’s intentions actually were, and whether the vibe that readers who care to see the subtext pick up from “Amok Time” and “City on the Edge” has anything to do with Pevney’s own interpretation of that relationship.  
  
Anyway. Apart from those two things, “The Apple” is pretty rotten. Bring on the Doomsday Machine!


	34. THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE

**STARDATE: December 2, 2011**

**THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE**  
 **Written by Norman Spinrad**  
  
I enjoyed this more than I thought I would enjoy an episode about a bunch of guys trying to penetrate a gigantic floating genocidal vagina.  
  
No, I am not overreading. Go take a look at the starship zooming in for the kill on this “doomsday machine” and you tell me what YOU think that looks like.  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise, responding to a distress call from another Federation starship called the Constellation, is traveling through a region of space in which all the planets seem to have been inexplicably reduced to debris. There seems to be quite a bit of subspace interference, which Lieutenant—HOLY SHIT! UHURA’S BLONDE! OMG we’re in another parallel universe! Oh, no, wait, they’re calling this chick Lieutenant Palmer. I guess Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig were both off filming movies or something that week, cause there’s some random guy in Chekhov’s seat too.  Anyway, they find the Constellation drifting, dead in the lack of water. The Constellation’s life support systems are functioning everywhere but the bridge, however, so the wonderously wrapped Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, and a damage control team beam aboard to see what they can find out. The crew is not so much dead as missing—apart from the captain, Kirk’s old buddy Commodore Matt Decker, who they discover slumped over a desk in one of the rooms. Decker is alive, but he’s definitely not well; somehow the tragedy has caused his stubble to lengthen. Painfully, Decker coughs up his story: they were attacked by an enormous “thing” wielding a massive energy beam—“pure anti-proton,” whatever that means—which did major damage to the ship. When things seemed to have gone beyond hope of recovery, Decker beamed the crew down to a nearby planet and stayed behind to go down with the ship. Well, after that happened, the transporter went out, which meant Decker couldn’t do anything about it when the “beast” sliced up and ate the planet onto which he had just beamed his crew.   
  
Kirk sends McCoy and Decker back to the Enterprise, staying behind with Scotty et al. to help get the Constellation ready to be towed. Alas, the doomsday machine is soon back and turning its attentions to the Enterprise. This “planet-killer,” as the Enterprise crew eventually decides to call it (Decker calls it a “beast,” a “thing,” a “devil,” and other such endearments) is a long, hollow tube with irregular sides which testify to its origin as a model crafted from some sort of Sculpey-like product, tapered at one end and with a mouth on the other end which is easily capable of swallowing a galaxy-class starship. In addition to shooting out “pure anti-proton” beams capable of pulverizing a planet, this thing also generates an energy damping field that plays hell with communication and causes various inconvenient kinds of energy drain. Spock is just about to beam Kirk back over when they take a hit from the planet-killer that takes out the transporter; communication goes out soon after that.   
  
While Spock and Sulu work on getting the Enterprise through its first battle with the planet-killer, Kirk gets Scotty and the damage control team to get the Constellation maneuverable and fix the viewing screens so they can do something to help.  
  
The Enterprise manages to escape the thing, which is apparently programmed to ignore small fry like starships as long as they’re not moving around in its immediate vicinity. The planet-killer moves off toward a densely populated star system where it will no doubt continue on its genocidal way. Spock tells Sulu to backtrack to the Constellation so they can pick up Kirk and Scotty and so on. Commodore Decker tells Sulu to turn around and chase the planet-killer. Honey badger tells Sulu to carry out his last order. Decker invokes Starfleet regulations and takes command. Honey badger steps aside. McCoy says fuck regulations, honey badger, you can’t let that lunatic take over. Honey badger says, how about you stop bitching and do something useful like certifying him unfit for command. McCoy’s happy to do it, but honey badger wants medical records, which McCoy doesn’t have. Decker orders McCoy off the bridge, and off they go on their suicide mission.   
  
And that’s why, when Scotty finally gets the viewscreen operational, the first thing Kirk sees when he turns it on is his beloved ship trying to phaser through the planet-killer’s “solid neutronium” hull. Then the Enterprise gets stuck in a tractor beam which starts pulling it into the giant gaping fiery maw. On the Enterprise, a tense exchange between Decker and Spock ends with Spock telling Decker that if he insists on committing suicide this will prove he is unfit and honey badger will relieve his ass from command. Decker most reluctantly gives the order to veer off; but it’s too late. They are saved only by the Constellation firing on the planet-killer and distracting it long enough for the Enterprise to break loose. The Enterprise then distracts the planet-killer from the Constellation, and everyone’s ok for now…except Decker wants to go back and attack the fucking thing AGAIN. Just as Spock is laying down a badass logical beatdown on Decker, Uhura’s blonde doppelganger finally gets ship-to-ship communication back—just in time for Kirk to blast Decker for trying to destroy his ship and give Spock the authorization to relieve him from command “on my personal authority as captain.” Honey badger kicks Decker’s ass off the bridge; a smilin’ Sulu plots in a course to circle back and pick up Kirk and Scotty.   
  
On the way to sickbay, Decker overpowers the two redshirts assigned to him (you know, whoever’s training their security officers does a crappy job), runs out to the shuttle bay, and takes off in one of the shuttlecraft. Kirk calls Decker and tries to talk him out of committing suicide; but Decker’s going to “take this thing right down its throat,” and that he does. The shuttlecraft gets sucked into the giant maw and blows up.  
  
As Kirk is lamenting to his beloved honey badger that Decker died “for nothing,” Sulu mentions that there has been a miniscule drop in the planet-killer’s power output. This gives Kirk an idea: he’ll drive the Constellation into the planet-killer’s mouth, set off a timed detonator that will blow the Constellation’s impulse engines, and beam himself back to the Enterprise before the thing goes off.  Scotty helps Kirk set everything up. But of course as soon as Scotty gets over to the Enterprise, the transporter goes on the fritz. Kirk pushes the button and waits to be beamed aboard. He gets more and more nervous. Scotty charges around desperately trying to repair the transporter. The Constellation floats into the maw; it blows up; and Kirk materializes on the transporter pad juuuuuuust in time. The gigantic genocidal vagina is now dead. Bittersweet hooray! **END SUMMARY**

  
You know, I normally don’t go in for psychoanalytic readings. My personal opinion is that Freud was making shit up and Lacan was insane and both of them managed to turn their shared preoccupation with their own penises into a colossally oppressive system of patriarchal bullshit. Nevertheless, I cannot help thinking, as I watch Decker “take this thing right down its throat” and then watch Kirk “ram her right down its throat” and then watch each man stare horrified into the round opening of this immense tunnel as it inches ever closer, about how often a mainstream sci-fi/action flick builds to a climax in which a bunch of men drive some contraption into an enormous mammomorphic or vaginalike object and then blow it up. I always thought that blowing up the Death Star in _Star Wars_ was the model that everyone copied; but perhaps that honor should go to “The Doomsday Machine.” (No doubt Lucas was a fan. Maybe Spielberg was too, because the music for the approaching Doomsday Machine sounds a lot like the _Jaws_ theme.) I mean this isn’t just a vagina dentata. This is a flaming, insatiable, planet-devouring vagina that says, “Listen, punk, I brought you into the world, and I will TAKE YOU OUT.” And I think about my own vagina and all it’s been through, and I just think, really? Y’all are _that_ fucking scared of this? I mean I know it’s the origin of the world and whatnot but… _really_?  
  
Nevertheless, as I said, I enjoyed this episode more than I enjoy most action plots—probably because, SFX technology still being in its infancy, the conflict is largely character-driven. The real meat of this episode is the battle for control fought between three men who ought to be working together. Spinrad constructs Decker’s narrative to achieve maximum pathos: we have already been told that there are only two planets left in this system, neither inhabitable, so by the time Decker starts talking about beaming his crew down, we pretty much know what the end of that story’s gonna be. But Kirk and McCoy don’t work it out, and Decker’s forced to spell it out for them:  
  
 **KIRK: Matt, where’s your crew?**  
 **DECKER: On the third planet.**  
 **KIRK: There is no third planet.**  
 **DECKER: Don’t you think I know that?**  
  
OW! My gut! It has been punched!  
  
Though we’re used to seeing Kirk separated from the Enterprise while it’s in peril, there is real dramatic value in putting him into another starship instead of down on the planet. Instead of being stuck either agonizing or barking orders into a communicator, Kirk can actually ride to the rescue. It’s nice to see him get out of the comfy chair and work his ass off to turn the Constellation’s burned-out hulk into something he can sail. As Kirk is showing us what a scrappy little attack dog he really is, Decker sleazes himself into Kirk’s captain’s chair and conclusively proves that no matter how crazy captains can be, commodores can be crazier.

  
What I like about Spock’s initial confrontation with Decker is the way they do the crew reactions. We’ve come a long way from “The Galileo Seven” and “Balance of Terror;” it’s pretty clear that everyone on that bridge trusts Spock now and would much rather have him running the ship than Decker. Spock holds out—with the tacit help and approval of Sulu, who obeys Spock a lot faster than he obeys Decker—as long as he can, only capitulating when Decker finally finds the right chapter of Starfleet Regulations to cite at him. The inevitable dustup with McCoy that follows plays well to the relationship that Kelley and Nimoy have been creating for their characters. Spock and McCoy really want the same thing—to get that crazy asshat off the bridge—and Spock signals his willingness to collude with McCoy in order to do it; but what Spock won’t do, even to save the Enterprise, is treat McCoy’s guesstimate of Decker’s mental state as if it’s factual, and though this pisses McCoy off he knows better than to argue. Takei, like Nimoy, is learning to do a lot with very little; his Impassive Face for Decker is pretty different from his Impassive Face for Spock.    
  
Best Honey Badger moment:  
  
 **SPOCK: I do not wish to place you under arrest.**  
 **DECKER: You wouldn’t dare.**  
 **[Spock motions to two security goons]**  
 **DECKER: You’re bluffing.**  
 **SPOCK: Vulcans never bluff.**  
  
As I said, I find Kirk more appealing than usual, perhaps because he’s all lonely and vulnerable out there in the dark. Or perhaps it’s just that for once there’s a bigger asshole standing next to him. It’s immensely gratifying to see him ignoring Decker and demanding to speak to Spock; it’s also in character that Spock won’t answer until Decker allows him to. Of course, this “personal authority as captain of the Enterprise” is bullshit; the important thing, as Kirk surely knows by now, is that Spock can’t allow himself to rebel against authority (unless he’s in ponn farr or whacked with happy spores) unless that can be expressed as loyalty to some _other_ authority (as it is in “The Menagerie”). Another appealing thing about this Kirk is that he’s all right with the fact that he doesn’t want to die. His goal is not to sacrifice himself, but to solve the fucking problem; and watching him stare into the maw as he gradually comes to realize that he might not actually make it through this one is very affecting. When he does finally show up in the transporter room he’s hunched over his communicator, no doubt cursing into it.  
  
James Doohan’s agent must have been busy between Season 1 and Season 2, because all of a sudden Scotty’s everywhere. Scotty’s relationship to Kirk is more understated than Spock’s or McCoy’s but it’s still entertaining. My favorite moment there is when Scotty, back on the Enterprise, hears that the transporter has gone on the fritz just at the critical moment and climbs back into that one utility tube, muttering curses as he goes. Poor Scotty gets stuck delivering bad news a lot, and it surprises me how pessimistic he is. I remembered him as more cheerful; but I find that his dour naysaying plays off Kirk’s pigheaded optimism pretty well. I also note that in this episode, it is not Scotty but Spock who says, “They can’t take much more of this” (referring to the deflector shields).   
  
As for the cheesy allegory…well, they’re not even trying not to make it obvious. Everyone keeps asking why anyone would build a weapon like this; Kirk’s the only one who comes up with an answer:  
  
 **KIRK: Bones…did you ever hear of the Doomsday Machine?**  
 **MCCOY: I’m a doctor, not a mechanic.**  
  
He explicitly refers to the H-bomb as the historical model for the planet-killer: a weapon, as Kirk says, so powerful it could destroy both sides, built as a bluff but never intended to be used. The fact that the planet-killer has survived the people that built it and gone on to wreak havoc on people its creators never knew is also an obvious enough metaphor for the uncontrollable and millennia-long consequences of nuclear production and nuclear war. Kirk says at the end that since he used the Constellation’s (apparently nuclear-powered) impulse engines to destroy the planet-killer, this makes it the first time a Doomsday Machine has been “put to constructive use.”   
  
You know, so far, since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have in fact managed to avoid a nuclear war. We take that more or less for granted now; but back in the 1980s, I didn’t, and certainly they couldn’t in 1967. Perhaps the fact that we somehow failed to actually use all these nuclear weapons we spent so goddamn much money building should give us some hope for the future. We could start a PR campaign for the rest of the galaxy. Human Beings: Turns Out We’re Not Actually Dumb Enough to Nuke Our Entire Planet! Yet!  
  
Next up: Caaaaaaptain Kiiiiiirk! CAAAAAPTAIN KIIIIRK! GO BACK! GO BACK! GO BAAAAAAACK!!!


	35. CATSPAW

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I have a soft spot for this episode even though technically it is quite embarrassing and the script is no prize either. It's sort of so homely that you have to love it. And there is some nifty character stuff.

**STARDATE: December 3, 2011**

**CATSPAW**  
 **Written by: Robert Bloch**  
  
Robert Bloch, IMDB informs me, wrote the novel on which the film _Psycho_ was based. He was also behind “What are Little Girls Made Of?” and the upcoming “Wolf in the Fold.” And he also wrote…this.  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise is orbiting a planet of some kind. Sulu, Scotty, and a guy named Jackson have been down there scouting it out, but they’re overdue to call in and the Enterprise has lost contact. Jackson finally does call in and beam up. Kirk meets him in the transporter room. As soon as Jackson materializes, he falls over dead. As Kirk goes and cradles his body, a disembodied voice tells Kirk that there is a curse on their ship and warns him to go baaaaaaaaaaaack.  
  
Well, you know Kirk isn’t going baaaaaaaack as long as Scotty and Sulu are down there; so he, Spock, and McCoy beam down after them, putting Assistant Chief Engineer DeSalle in charge of the ship. You’d think that in a situation like this Kirk might leave Spock behind to mind the store, especially since the chief navigator and the chief engineer are MIA as well. But nobody died and left me in charge of landing party protocol; and anyhow, the last time we saw DeSalle it was in “Squire of Gothos,” so he’s familiar with this type of situation.  
  
What type of situation is that, you ask? Well, the type of situation where you show up on an alien planet which appears to be completely uninhabited and all of a sudden you run into something you thought existed only in the human imagination. In “Shore Leave” it was the White Rabbit. In “Squire of Gothos” it was a 19th century hunting lodge. And in “Catspaw,” it’s three weird sisters, all in crudely executed witch makeup and wigs, moaning, “Captain Kiiirk! Caaaaaaaptain Kiiiiiiiiirk! Go back. Go baaack! Gooo baaaaaaack!” They pronounce a curse on any who venture further. Spock’s comment, when asked for analysis: “Very bad poetry, captain.”  
  
Well, three apparitions aren’t going to daunt Our Heroes, so on they press through the fog until they come to a haunted castle. Inside the castle, they are greeted by a black cat wearing a crystal on its collar. Following the cat, they fall through a hole in the floor and are knocked unconscious. They awaken chained to the wall of a dungeon complete with cobwebs and skeletons. Scotty and Sulu walk in! Hooray! They are apparently zombies! Hurroo. A silent Scotty and Sulu unlock everyone and walk them at phaser point down to the banquet hall/throne room where the bald and berobed Korob is waiting for them with his little magic wand with its little crystal ball on the top.   
  
Korob does the whole “Welcome, my prisoners/guests, here’s some delicious food, hey, how about piles of precious jewels, anything else I can get you to make your imprisonment more comfortable?” thing. It’s established that they are “not native to this planet.” The only novelty about his act is that he’s talking to a cat during part of it. The cat runs off and returns as Sylvia, a brunette with truly terrifying hair and a flowy sparkly gown, wearing the same dangling crystal the cat was wearing. During the inevitable “release us and return us to our ship or else” conversation—I think I will refer to this from here on in as Kirkiblustering—Sylvia gives it up that her species is telepathic and that all this Halloweenery is based on what they perceived in the landing party’s minds. She demonstrates her power by producing an Enterprise Christmas ornament, explaining about sympathetic magic, and holding the teeny weeny metal Enterprise over a candle flame. DeSalle, when they contact him, reports that in fact the ship is burning up. Kirk agrees to cooperate. Sylvia and Korob want information from them; they won’t give it. When Kirk points out that now that they’ve contact the Enterprise there will be search parties coming for them, Korob seals the model Enterprise inside a block of Lucite. Up on the Enterprise, Chekhov tells DeSalle that they’re trapped in a forcefield the like of which he has never seen.  
  
Zombie Scott and Zombie Sulu take Kirk and Spock back to the dungeon; McCoy stays behind with Sylvia. When McCoy later shows up, he’s a zombie too. Kirk gets taken to see Sylvia, who has been having some conflict with Korob over how the mission’s going. See, they don’t normally get to have humanoid forms; and Sylvia’s really starting to dig her new body and all the “sensations” she can experience through it. So when Kirk shows up, Sylvia puts the moves on him. Kirk leads her on, hoping to be able to manipulate her, and does manage to find out a couple things about how they’re doing what they’re doing before Sylvia figures out what’s going on. An enraged Sylvia banishes Kirk back to his dungeon.  
  
Korob shows up to bust Kirk and Spock out. Sensation has proved too much for Sylvia, he says; she’s out of control, and they better escape before she just goes on a rampage. A GIANT CAT appears at the cell door and tries to bust its way in. Korob tries to fend her off while Kirk boosts Spock up through the hole in the ceiling. As Kirk is about to escape, the cell door falls in, crushing Korob. Kirk grabs Korob’s wand and hops up through the hole. And now it’s time for ZOMBIE CREW ATTACK! First McCoy comes after them with a mace; Scotty comes through with same; and then Sulu, who doesn’t need a weapon because he IS a weapon. Kirk and Spock knock them out and pile them up and then, OMG, here comes the GIANT CAT! And it’s YOWLING! Kirk taunts the cat, telling it that he has the “transmuter.” He is immediately whisked back to the banquet hall, where Sylvia is back in human form. After some fencing around, Kirk breaks the ball on Korob’s wand.  
  
That was, apparently, the thing they were using to create the environment; so everything disappears. Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and Sulu arrive from different directions, now no longer zombies, to discover Korob and Sylvia have reverted to their true forms—tiny blue birdlike creatures with claw arms and an interesting assortment of antennae—and are now wilting away. They beam up, with Kirk remarking that as much of an allusion as all this was,  Jackson is still really and truly dead. **END SUMMARY**  
  
I’ve always kind of had a soft spot for this one, despite its howling badness. Looking back on it, I wonder if that was because I had an unacknowledged crush on Sylvia. She’s pretty weird-looking—that giant globe of brown hair is insane even by this show’s standards—and the sequence in which she becomes a series of “different” women for Kirk’s pleasure (by magically donning different wigs and costumes) was disturbing to me then and is still pretty weird now. But she does have presence, and I have to say I kind of like the way she says “It excites me.” Which she says a lot, because once she’s in her humanoid female body, virtually every “sensation” is thrilling to her. Of course this is classic patriarchal  man=reason/mind/transcendence  woman=unreason/body/carnality bullshit; and I guess as long as we’re in a Jungian nightmare, it makes sense that the Dark Lady is prowling around being her wily maneating self.   
  
And we are, in fact, explicitly in a Jungian nightmare. When I say “explicitly,” I mean that Spock talks to Kirk about an unattributed “theory” about some kind of collective unconscious. Spock’s theory is that Sylvia and Korob can only read their subconscious minds—which explains why, even though they’re telepathic, they have to zombify their captives in order to get the information from them that they need. (Why don’t Sylvia and Korob bring in anything from the dark reaches of the Vulcan collective unconscious? They must have one, and I bet it’s SPECTACULAR. I know, I know…special fucking badass Vulcan mental discipline.) This is what explains all the spooky stuff: not realizing that they had completely missed the higher functions, they built the environment based on all the deep, dark fears they found down in the subconscious. When Kirk asks, after Sylvia becomes HUGE and MEOWING, “Why a cat?” Spock says that of all animals, it’s the one most primally terrifying to humans.  
  
Really? What about spiders? Bring Shelob into this dungeon, and THEN you got a party.   
  
And that’s really the whole problem with this episode: none of this from-our-darkest-fears bullshit is ever actually scary—certainly not to the viewers, and most of the time not to the characters either. Some of that can perhaps be put down to execution. The desperate expedients to which the team resorted on the GIANT CAT ATTACKS sequences are particularly laughable; there is no point at which you are unaware that you are looking at images of a regular-sized cat. The cat itself is too fluffy to be sinister. The “dungeon” is clearly not made of stone. The “hole” through which the cast falls has molded edges. And so on. But part of it is that the content itself is not that scary. OK, dungeons—inconvenient, uncomfortable, dank, but so what. Cobwebs and skeletons, ditto. Three witches from _Macbeth_ : Bitch, please.   
  
Now, I understand that this was intended to be partly campy. You can’t, after all, do a straight-up horror movie if Spock’s part of the gang. Honey badger don’t give a shit. Or, as McCoy says when Sylvia and Korob are surprised by his failure to be impressed, “He doesn’t know about Halloween.” And in fact, Sylvia and Korob are not using anything you can’t buy at any Target nowadays during the month of October. These things may in fact have once been scary, but they’ve been commercialized and kitsched out to the point where nobody can muster much of a frisson any more. There are some nice character moments: Kirk’s despondent little, “Bones…” when he realizes McCoy has been zombified; Kirk punching McCoy’s lights out and then grabbing him to let him down gently onto the floor; Kirk’s look of wary weariness when he realizes Sulu’s coming for him too; and their commentary on the end of the Zombie Officers Attack:  
  
 **KIRK: [surveying heap of unconscious comrades] Well, at least we found them.**  
 **SPOCK: Fortuitous, captain. And now that we have them all together?**  
  
Doesn’t work as well if you can’t see the eyebrows. Anyway, I’m not against camp. But I think this episode would have been a lot better off if it could have really scared the shit out of the viewer a couple of times. Part of it may simply be that the production team didn't do anything much different from what they always do; in terms of lighting, editing, music and other atmospherics, there was no attempt to replicate the filmic conventions that make horror scary.   
  
Shatner tries to create some tension and anxiety by providing the necessary emotional reactions—he’s doing all the heavy lifting here, since Scott, Sulu, and McCoy are zombified and Spock is Spock—and he does all right with it. The scene in which he tries to exploit Sylvia’s attraction to him is fairly hackneyed and kind of icky to watch, but his response to her accusation of “using” her kicks it up a notch. “And why not?” he bursts out, nearly shaking with sudden rage and hatred. “You’ve been using me.” Yeah…it’s no fun being the piece of meat, is it, Kirk? Maybe you’ll remember this next time you’re schmoozing up a junior officer at the science lab Christmas party, and…ah, who am I kidding. In his final confrontation with Sylvia, just before he breaks the transmuter, he goes on a rant about how she’s “not a woman” because she “asks for love and returns pain.” Wow, being hit on by the creepy person who has power over you really stung, didn’t it?  
  
Anyway. I think the whole premise could have been a lot better executed; and if it had been, then it might have been a legitimately compelling episode. As it is, it’s pretty bad. Though it’s not as bad as “The Apple;” it’s not as bad as “The Alternative Factor;” it’s not as bad as…wait…what is this that’s up next? “I, Mudd?”  
  
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!


	36. I, MUDD

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The second and, mercifully, the last of the Mudd episodes. Mostly awful, but with enough weirdness to make it mostly watchable. Thank God none of the later Treks resurrected Mudd...although I guess we still don't know what fresh hells the Abrams reboot might have in store for us.

**STARDATE: December 12, 2011**

**I, MUDD**  
 **Written by Stephen Kandel**  
  
Of all the science fiction shows in all the world...he had to walk into mine.  
  
 **The Summary:** McCoy accosts Spock in the hallway to ask his opinion about a new crewman named Norman. McCoy, alas, is unable to articulate his concerns about the oddly wooden-seeming Norman without offending Spock. Norman, meanwhile, takes over the ship, then strides onto the bridge and announces that he’s an android, that he’s rigged the engines so that any attempt at tampering with them will cause the ship to go kaboom, and that they’ll all enjoy a 4-day ride toward some unknown destination while Norman goes into sleep mode. Four days later, at Norman’s insistence, Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Uhura, and Chekhov are beamed down to some sort of artificial compound which is inhabited by androids (all of them, apparently, female apart from Norman) and which is ruled over by…Harry Mudd.  
  
You remember Harry Mudd. He’s the intergalactic space pimp and human trafficker who got those three fetchingly attired hotties hooked on Venus drugs and then sold them to the dilithium miners back in “Mudd’s Women.” Someone at the top loved THAT guy so much they brought him back.  
  
Kirk is, of course, surprised to see him. It turns out that Mudd escaped from confinement and fetched up on this planet, where the androids—constructed by beings from the Andromeda galaxy who have since become extinct—gratefully seized upon him as someone who could satisfy their need to serve and study humanoid life forms. Mudd has been having a grand old time ordering the androids around and having new androids constructed and programmed to his specifications. The model we see most of is the Alice, whose iterations are played by a pair of identical twins; but Mudd has also had a number of other fembot series put into production, so that whenever he wants to hop into bed with eight or ten identical ‘women’ he has quite a range of options to choose from. He has also had them make an android replica of his nagging wife Stella, just so that he can have the pleasure of telling her to shut up. That’s what Mudd’s been doing with his time; and though he’s enjoyed it, he’s starting to get stir crazy. Alas, the androids won’t let him leave; without him they have no sense of purpose. So Mudd’s plan was to hijack a spaceship, get the crew down onto the planet, and then take off, leaving the captured crew to provide the androids with a sense of purpose. He didn’t know it would be Kirk’s crew; but isn’t that just the icing on the cake!  
  
The androids beam down the entire crew and set about rigging the ship so that they can operate it without humans. Meanwhile, they attempt to ‘serve’ the captive Enterprise crew by offering them whatever they seem to want. Scotty gets a fancy new engine to play with. McCoy gets a fancy new bio lab to work in. Chekhov gets to flirt with the Alices. And Uhura gets…to think about how awesome it would be if they could put her consciousness into an immortal and ageless android body so she could be young and beautiful forever.  
  
Kirk, of course, gets nothing, because nothing makes him happy apart from captaining the Enterprise. So he’s the one pushing the escape plan. Things don’t get very far until Mudd discovers that the androids STILL won’t let him leave. They don’t want anyone to leave. The androids have decided after reviewing their notes that humanoids are in dire need of some adult supervision, and their plan is to take the Enterprise and go colonize the galaxy with androids who will babysit these irresponsible humanoid life forms and keep them from hurting themselves and each other.  
  
Well, Mudd can’t stand that idea, so he agrees to help with the escape plan. After faking the androids out with a “plan” designed to fail—Uhura pretends to betray them to the androids because she wants immortality, but it’s all part of the plan—they execute the real one. This plan is a massive group _bullshitsu_ exercise in which they shut down the androids by performing irrational and illogical behavior in their presence. Norman, who has been identified by Spock as the mainframe that runs all the other terminals, blows up while attempting to assign a truth value to the statement “I am lying to you,” delivered by a gloating Harry Mudd. He asks Kirk to explain, since “only humans can explain their behavior;” but Kirk, gloating even harder, says, “I am not programmed to respond in that area.” Smoke comes out of Norman’s head, and it’s all over.  
  
Somehow—and it is never explained how—Kirk and crew get the androids up and running again, but reprogrammed to adapt the planet for humanoid colonization. Somehow—again, never explained—they get control of the Enterprise back. Before going back to the ship, Kirk informs Harry Mudd that he’s not coming along. Harry will instead stay on the planet with the androids and work with them on their terraforming project. Kirk also points out that they have produced a special android line that will help him learn to work with the androids “instead of exploiting them.” This is, of course, the Stella line—modified so that Mudd can no longer shut them off with a verbal command. Just as Mudd discovers with horror that Kirk has produced at least 500 of this model, the crew beams back to the ship, leaving Harry stuck in hell. **END SUMMARY**

  
Not too long ago I was having a conversation about comedy with a friend and he spoke of “people who find Falstaff funny” as a distinct demographic category. Those are the people for whom this episode was made. Mudd is the Falstaff of the Star Trek universe; he’s just a big ball of uncontainable bodily appetites animated by a lazy, amoral, cowardly, hedonistic soul. Come to think of it, the fact that his fatness is a marker of his laziness and amorality may be one of the reasons why I don’t find Falstaff funny. The joke, I suppose, is that Mudd is the polar opposite of the uptight, honor-bound, discipline-happy, obsessive and ambitious Kirk, and so it should be fun to play them off each other. Or perhaps the joke is that Mudd is the carnal form of Kirk’s repressed and thwarted libidinal desires, and so it’s fun to watch them square off in some kind of Freudian boxing match. Either way, my problem with this episode is that I am not one of the people who find Falstaff funny. I find him annoying. REALLY annoying.  
  
Kirk refers to Harry at the end of the episode as an “irritant.” And that’s about how I felt most of the time watching this episode: irritated. The retrograde treatment of women is of course part and parcel of the Mudd mystique; it’s slightly less offensively done here because the “women” that Mudd sexually exploits are mostly androids, but Mudd’s manufacturing for himself an endless harem of identical fembots is still pretty gross. And it’s equally annoying that whereas the male officers are wooed by technology and science and the opportunity for unlimited research and advancements in knowledge, Uhura’s big temptation is an android body. Where’s her hopped up super-exciting lab with all kinds of futuristic communications equipment for her to play around with? No, all she wants is to be turned into one of these fembots. It’s nice that they give Uhura the chance to repudiate this desire during the fake escape plan—something which is not really justified by the plot, and appears to have been put in mainly as an opportunity to abuse Harry and to get the spectators maybe slightly concerned that Uhura might actually mean it before reassuring everyone of her loyalty. But after Kirk tells her she was wonderful, Uhura says, “I half believed it myself.” Great…so she really sorta kinda does want one of those android bodies. Well, I guess she’s a woman, isn’t she. Hey, Stephen Kandel, you can be the first recipient of a brand new prize I just made up: the Uhura Fail Award, which will be given to writers who go above and beyond Star Trek’s usual standard in their mishandling of the show’s only really interesting female character.  
  
McCoy doesn’t get a whole lot to do in this episode apart from piss off Spock; and Spock doesn’t have a lot to do either, apart from inspire humorous comparisons between Vulcans and androids. “Spock, you’re going to love it here,” says Mudd. “They all talk just like you do.” McCoy’s opening banter with Spock gets some grudging respect from me for its realism—although this is probably more to the credit of Nimoy and Kelley. After McCoy says there’s “something wrong with a man who never smiles,” and then lists a number of other traits that Spock shares with androids, Spock starts walking away; McCoy, realizing he’s stepped in it again, goes after him to assure him that he only meant this wasn’t normal for a _human_. As often happens in real-life versions of this conversation, by apologizing McCoy only manages to dig himself in deeper; attempting to explain his gaffe he winds up saying, “The ears make all the difference.” The two of them time the whole exchange perfectly to create that special kind of awkwardness that arises when one person is being unintentionally racist and the other is trying to walk the line between pretending that this crack didn’t bother him and ripping off the head of a guy he mostly respects and likes. But not to worry, by the end of the episode they’re bantering away like usual; McCoy gloats about how the humans bested all these ‘logical’ androids, and how Spock must be sad to leave, and Spock says that on the contrary, he’s got a renewed sense of purpose, since now he understands how “desperately needed” he is on a ship full of these crazy humans.  
  
Will Chekhov’s response to learning that the Alices are programmed by Harry Mudd to sexually service humanoid males—“This is even better than Leningrad!”—win for Most Annoying Use of Chekhov in Season Two? I cannot yet say. I very much fear that it won’t.  
  
The only part of this episode, in fact, that I have any time for is the _bullshitsu_ sequence. I enjoyed this as a callow youth, but I am now better equipped to appreciate the fact that what really crashes these androids’ hard drives is not logical paradox, but acting itself. Whoever programmed these androids, they are apparently allergic to any form of representation that’s not literal. Kirk first hatches this plan after he attempts to exploit an inconsistency in the androids’ programming: they are programmed to serve humans and to make them happy, but nevertheless refuse to allow them their freedom. Whenever one of the androids asks Kirk if there’s anything he wants or needs, he always says the same thing: “My ship.” When one of the Alices replies that his ship doesn’t count as a desire or a need, Kirk says, “The Enterprise is a beautiful lady and we love her.” This causes Alice’s tag to blink while she requests clarification from Norman. Having seen that a simple metaphor acts on Alice like a computer virus, Kirk decides that the best way to engineer a fatal system error is to do a few theater games.  
  
Because basically, what they execute is a series of the kind of acting exercises which are supposed to help actors learn to make an imaginary universe real to the spectators. Step one, of course, is for the performers to act as if imaginary things are real; and one way people teach actors to do this is by taking physical objects away from them and making them conjure up their props out of nothing but thin air and bullshit. This particular skill—and all the officers are good at it, probably because all the actors playing them have had to do this over and over again in acting school—is precisely what drives the androids crazy. In the first skit, everyone has to act as if they can hear the music being played by Scotty and McCoy on invisible instruments as Chekhov and Uhura waltz. The Alices, unable to understand why all the humanoids are responding to sensory stimuli that don’t exist, are further baffled by a very old literary convention: when they ask why Uhura has just cracked Chekhov across the face, Kirk replies, “Because she likes him.” (Do the feminist rant about that particular bit of patriarchal bullshit for yourselves; I’m moving on.) After the Alices who witness this performance shut down, a more elaborate skit is improvised for Norman’s benefit. Though there is plenty of absurd and paradoxical dialogue, what seems to unhinge Norman most is the way everyone reacts to things that aren’t there. There’s an extended bit in which everyone treats a handful of air as if it is a powerful “explosive;” at one point the other officers “kill” Scotty by pointing their index fingers at him and making phaserlike noises. This grievously perplexes Norman. Kandel does incorporate parodies of typical Star Trek dialogue, including a piece delivered in monotonous unison by Scotty and McCoy about how humans need misery to be truly happy, and a speech about humanity’s striving for the stars delivered by Kirk as he stands with one foot on Scotty’s ‘dead’ body. And of course, one can’t forget Spock’s contribution to the mayhem, as he takes Norman aside and earnestly informs him that “Logic is a little bird chirping in a field. Logic is a wreath of pretty flowers that smell bad.” But basically, acting itself is offered up in this sequence as _the_ most android-slayingly irrational thing human beings do. And _that_ is a joke I can appreciate.  
  
Much as I hate Harry Mudd, I have to say I did think it rather mean of them to ditch him after he assisted in their escape plan. And maybe that’s one of the things that pisses me off about Falstaff: he’s so clearly made to be punished. He’s put into the world so the heroes can prove their virtue by kicking him around. I suppose we’re supposed to believe that Harry will escape again soon, or else we’re supposed to see this as his just punishment for being the pig he is.  
  
Either way, I’m glad to be leaving Mudd behind. Mudd will return, of course, disguised as “Cyrano Jones,” in _The Trouble With Tribbles._ But at least there he’s not the point of the story.  
  
Next up… “Metamorphosis.”


	37. METAMORPHOSIS

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This episode deserves to be more widely known and better appreciated. I found it unexpectedly moving. The pacing is slow, but it's worth it. 
> 
> Like "This Side of Paradise," this episode was directed by Ralph Senensky, who maintains a blog called [Ralph's Cinema Trek](http://senensky.com/) which has very revealing and interesting behind-the-scenes write-ups of the TV episodes and films he was involved in, including the half-dozen TOS episodes he directed. I highly recommend his entry on [Metamorphosis](http://senensky.com/metamorphosis/). Senensky suggests that the Companion/Cochrane relationship may have been a coded interracial relationship. This is plausible, but it could just as easily be a coded queer relationship.

**STARDATE: December 17, 2011**

**METAMORPHOSIS**  
 **Written by Gene L. Coon**  
  
Fascinating.  
  
 **The Summary:** A Federation ambassador named Nancy Hedford is on the shuttle Galileo along with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, being ferried back to the Enterprise for medical treatment. She establishes her character as a ballbusting careerist bitch by snapping at all the men and blaming all of “the Starfleet” for her predicament. She was sent to a distant planet to stop a war, and while there contracted some extremely rare disease which will be fatal if she can’t get the proper treatment; and she’s pissed about it. Spock notices something weird; and in fact, floating in space ahead of them is a kind of paisley shape made of flickering polka dots. This disembodied fashion element soon engulfs the shuttlecraft and drags it willy-nilly down to the surface of a planetlike asteroid. There they discover a young and decent-looking man in a vintage jumpsuit who says his last name is Cochran. It turns out that this castaway is none other than Zefram Cochran, the inventor of “the space warp.” At the age of eighty-seven he launched himself into space, where he was met by the same thing that engulfed the Galileo and brought by it to this planet, where it rejuvenated him and has been keeping him alive and young and healthy—and marooned on this planet—for over a hundred and fifty years. Cochran calls this alien entity “the Companion,” because calling it Calypso would just be too obvious. The Companion communicates with Cochran, but nonverbally; he goes out to a special spot on the soundstage to summon it, and then it floats over and engulfs him, it shimmers for a while, and then it disappears.   
  
Well, Cochran let the Companion know he was dying of lonelness, and so the Companion has gone out and found him some human friends to keep him company on the planet. Hearing this throws Nancy Hedford into hysterics; McCoy bundles her off to a sickbed, because the disease is starting to manifest.   
  
Attempts to get the shuttle operational again are foiled when the Companion zaps Spock and then fries the shuttle. Spock’s zapping teaches him that the Companion is made mostly of electricity, and he soon devises a plan to short it out. Unfortunately, the Companion is not some little piss-ant energy forcefield; and when they try out Spock’s device it attacks Spock and Kirk and nearly throttles them. Cochran gets it to desist. Aggression having failed, Kirk decides at McCoy’s suggestion to try communicating with it. He busts out the universal translator, which Spock rigs so that it will work with the Companion, and out he goes to talk to it.   
  
The Companion is interested in this new form of communication; but it’s not open to persuasion on the point of letting Cochran and the others go. The Man, as it calls Cochran, is everything to it. The Man, as it says, “must continue,” and he needs friends to continue, and they’re the friends he needs, so we’re just all gonna stay on the planet and hang out and have a good time and I’ll be going now.  
  
I’m going to have to stop calling the Companion “it” now, because the voice that comes out of the universal translator is female. When Cochran asks why, Kirk tells him that “male and female are universal constants” and that the Companion’s voice is an indication that the Companion is female. They also explain to Cochran that in their opinion, the Companion is in love with him. Cochran flips out, rants about how he’s not going to stick around to be preyed on by some inhuman monster, and stalks off in a huff. From within, Nancy Hedford is heard making agitated noises. McCoy and Kirk return, and she talks about how important love is and how she never got to love and what kind of a life is that and why can’t Cochran appreciate love when he’s offered it instead of resenting it.  
  
Kirk goes back out to talk to the Companion. He does his best to explain to the Companion that because the two of them are so different, Cochran and the Companion can’t really join, and so that means they don’t really have love, and this is all very bad for The Man. The Companion disappears. While the men reconnoiter, all of a sudden Nancy Hedford appears on the doorstep, looking fresh as a daisy. Turns out the Companion has merged with her. The Companion’s made her healthy; Hedford has made the Companion embodied and mortal. While Kirk talks to Scotty—the new improved Companion is allowing their technology to work now—about picking them up, Cochran and Companion/Hedford talk about the future. The Companion can’t leave the planet without dying. She, or rather they, want Cochran to go see this new universe he’s so excited about. But Cochran decides he can’t leave the Companion/Hedford, because he’s in love with her, or rather them. So in the end, Cochran and Companion/Hedford stay behind on the planet. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy return in the Galileo, Kirk promising Cochran that at his request they won’t say anything about the fact that he’s still alive and living on a distant asteroid with Companion/Hedford. How they plan to explain Hedford’s disappearance is never discussed, though when McCoy brings up the fact that there’s still a war to be stopped, Kirk does say that he’s sure “Starfleet can find some other woman who can stop that war.” **END SUMMARY**  
  
It’s possible that before this review is over I may say one or two mean things about Gene L. Coon. So let me start by saying that as far as imagining aliens go, Coon wins. Everyone else is doing humanoids, humanoids, and more humanoids; Coon so far has come up with the Horta, the Organians, and now the Companion. Although nobody makes as big a deal over “Metamorphosis” as they do over, say, “City on the Edge,” I found this one a lot more interesting than a lot of the previous episodes. What you have in the first half of the episode is a strange but poignant human/alien romance. And then we find out the Companion is a girl, and that ruins EVERYTHING…until it doesn’t.  
  
Cochran’s initial feelings about the Companion are ambivalent. He’s grateful to it for nurturing him, and has “affection” for it; but he’s also bored out of his mind. Sort of the way Odysseus is starting to get tired of being Calypso’s boy toy at the beginning of the Odyssey. Not that I would ever suspect Coon of ripping off a premise from the classics. At the same time, Cochran seems to enjoy communing with it, though he reports feeling “drained” afterward. (Oh my God…I just realized that the Companion is a sparkly vampire. NOBODY TELL THE TWILIGHT PEOPLE! THE FANFIC THEY WOULD PRODUCE WOULD CAUSE THE UNIVERSE TO IMPLODE!) The first time Kirk and McCoy witness the two of them communicating, they recognize immediately that to the Companion, Cochran is not a “pet” or a captive but “a lover.” McCoy suggests “symbiosis,” but Kirk prefers to think of it as a “joining.” It’s the apparent intimacy and mutuality of their connection—the Companion’s image is superimposed on Cochran, who can be seen through it—that makes Kirk and McCoy reach for the term “lover.” Though he has no qualms about killing the Companion in order to escape (Cochran does; when he agrees to help set up Spock’s ambush he refers to himself  as a “Judas goat”), Kirk seems to be rather touched by this manifestation of its love for Cochran. He and McCoy display, in fact, the same kind of openness to the new and the alien that made “Devil in the Dark” so refreshing. It is interesting (to me, anyway) that they are both willing and able to identify this as a love relationship _before_ one of the partners has either a human body or a gender. Because this Cochran/Companion thing may not exactly be gay, but it is certainly queer; and Coon goes to some lengths to show that Kirk and McCoy are all right with that. They even kind of think it’s beautiful—if extremely inconvenient.  
  
And then Kirk busts out the universal translator, and they hear that female voice.  
  
As in “Devil in the Dark,” this plot pivots on the moment when the alien creature is given a gender. Once the Horta becomes a she and a mother, everyone can suddenly understand her motives, and though she remains different she is no longer monstrous. This is another illustration of one of Great Laws of Normalcy, which dictates that before you can assume a human identity you must first accept a gender. (This is why the baby’s gender has to be determined before it can be named. For an illustration of the price paid by people who either cannot or will not comply with this Great Law of Normalcy, I refer you to Leslie Feinberg’s _Stone Butch Blues_.) It’s especially interesting, from that point of view, that the Companion gets a gender and a voice and language all at the same time: she becomes a gendered subject _by_ becoming a speaking subject. (All right, I’ll stop now. It’s just, you know, gender studies people, we live for this shit.)  
  
In “Metamorphosis,” though, what happens after this turning point is much more complicated than it is in “Devil in the Dark.” Kirk and McCoy are hugely pleased to find out that the Companion is female, presumably because it confirms their reading of the Companion as Cochran’s “lover.” Kirk, in fact, remarks after that first conversation that the Companion’s “gender” could transform the whole situation—probably because he believes that a female lover might be more willing to sacrifice her own needs for the good of “the Man.” This discovery also transforms the meaning of Kirk’s own openness to this relationship. He and McCoy are fine with the fact that one of the parties in this partnership is not a human; but it’s a relief to know that one’s still the guy and one’s still the chick.  
  
Cochran has a completely different reaction—and that’s because Cochran, who has been cut off from human society for the past 150 years, is not sufficiently flexible about the mind to perceive that the Companion is in love with him _until_ he can see it as female and therefore view his relationship with it as heterosexual. Cochran is evidently not only unwilling to accept human/alien love but unable to imagine (as Kirk and McCoy initially appear to be) that something that’s not female could be in love with something that’s male. Once the Companion’s femininity reveals her to him as his “lover”—with help from Kirk , Spock, and McCoy, who now finally communicate to him the insight they’ve already shared with each other—Cochran is suddenly horrified and disgusted. Part of this, of course, is his realization that even though he’s the man in this relationship, he’s also the meat; when eros comes into play (and that is implied by the term “lover”), what used to seem to him like communion now becomes predation or, even worse, prostitution. But of course part of it is that when you name the Companion as female, their relationship reveals itself as the same masculine nightmare of domesticity as captivity that was realized so much more luridly in “The Cage.” The Companion’s insistence on keeping Cochran at home—it is, as she says, “her nature” to stay in one place, which really ought to have been his first tip that she was “female”—and her determination to nurture him whether he consents to it or not make her just another scheming woman out to trap herself a man and turn him into a husband and father. And Cochran, as the guy who invented the fucking space warp already, is having none of THAT.  
  
Coon would appear, however, to be either smarter or more genuinely interested in women as human beings than Roddenberry is. He creates a crude kind of gender parity by having Nancy Hedford go through a similar Hideous Realization much earlier in the episode. When Cochran explains that they’re supposed to be ‘company’ for him, Nancy’s hysterical shouts of refusal—one of the words she manages to force out through the sobbing is “disgusting”—show that she knows EXACTLY what the Companion thinks _her_ job in this new play group is going to be. She knows a New Adam/New Eve setup when she sees one, and she can’t stand the idea of being forced into that role. She is thus the first person in the episode to object to the idea of love/sex/romance enforced by captivity; and even though she’s bundled immediately off to bed as soon as she does it, it’s interesting that Coon thereby marks this entrapment into domesticity as something done to women as well as to men.    
  
That’d be cooler if it weren’t for the way the conclusion treats Hedford. Her deathbed speech, in which she laments the fact that though she’s been “good at [her] job” she’s never “known love” or given it, is intended to serve as an indicator of her consent to what eventually happens. The Companion, which previously has refused to help Nancy despite an apparently magical ability to manipulate human biology, fuses with Nancy at the moment when she is about to die, thereby gaining for herself the body that will allow her to fully “join” with and “love” Cochran. Though the new being refers to herself as “we,” it’s hard to know exactly how much of Nancy Hertford survives the fusion. The pre-fusion Nancy Hedford never smiled and was kind of a jerk to everyone; but then we never find out what she was like before she discovered she had a potentially fatal illness. The Companion says that “that part of us was almost too weak to continue” when she took over; so we don’t really know whether Nancy’s spirit has departed and the only part of Nancy that enters into the “we” is her corporeal body, or whether Nancy and the Companion have a Trill-style joined being thing going on in there. Hell, since nobody in the landing party is really competent to assess this, for all we know the Companion has done a full possession on Nancy, and while the Companion is waxing lyrical on the delights of being embodied, Nancy’s in there impotently screaming, “GET THIS THING THE FUCK OUT OF ME!”  
  
To Coon, though, it doesn’t much matter what happened to Nancy Hedford; the point is to straighten out the Cochran/Companion relationship. It’s telegraphed pretty early on that Hedford is not going to make it out of this episode alive. The clearest evidence comes from Bones, who makes only a token effort to treat her. I understand the whole point of their shuttlecrafting her to the Enterprise was that you need a fully functional biolab to deal with this disease; but come on. Are you telling me that if it was Kirk who got hit with this disease, Bones wouldn’t be squatting by his bedside 24/7 trying to grow an antibiotic from one of Cochran’s 200 year old freeze-dried astronaut meals? The only thing that explains Bones’ curious lack of activity is the fact that Coon needs Nancy to be on her deathbed; that way the Companion’s fusing with her looks altruistic rather than opportunistic. Her approaching demise explains how the hard-edged career woman could agree to be possessed by the amorphous, soft, diaphanous, nurturing homebody, so that Cochran could fall in love with what is evidently Coon’s idea of the perfect woman. Cochran’s certainly excited about this new creature; now that the Companion’s embodied by a human woman he’s attracted to, he is able to realize that he’s loved the Companion all along.   
  
So it’s all normalized in the end…sort of. What I like about this episode, in spite of some of the more pukeworthy implications of this “male and female are universal constants” bullshit, is the way the alterity of that initial relationship and the alienness of the Companion are never fully eliminated, even by the ‘happy ending.’ Toward the end of the episode, after the ‘metamorphosis’ has taken place, Companion/Hedford unknots Nancy’s scarf and holds it up in front of her face so she can look at Cochran through it. The camera then assumes Companion/Hedford’s point of view. The pattern on the scarf is vaguely reminiscent of the Companion’s original appearance; and what she’s doing, we now realize, is trying to recapture the way the Companion used to see Cochran through the veil of her own substance. Through what, for this show, is a rare use of the subjective camera, we finally get the alien’s-eye view of the human it loves. When she abandons the attempt, we feel some of the loss that the metamorphosed Companion must feel even as she spouts the obligatory “how awesome it is to be human now” speech. And in justice to Coon I should point out that although the plot forces Hertford to give up her career in order to experience love, it also forces Cochran to give up his return to public life to do the same.  
  
From a show mythology point of view, this episode is important because of our first gander at this so-called “universal translator.” About which I have only this to say:   
  
The landing party’s ability to communicate with any of the aliens it encounters is an impossibility comparable to the impossibility of faster-than-lightspeed travel. Both impossibilities are absolutely necessary in order for the show to exist, however; they can’t have the landing party spend the first 45 minutes of every episode just figuring out how to overcome the language barrier, any more than they can have the crew going into stasis for 30 years every time they get a call to travel to a new solar system. (There is no language barrier on board the Enterprise or on any of the colonies, because in the future, all Earthlings will speak English.) I understand, as I imagine most viewers do, that we have to accept these impossibilities as the price of admission, and am willing to be fobbed off with some lame token attempt to address it. The problem is that whereas I am essentially illiterate when it comes to advanced physics, and therefore willing to swallow the possibility of a matter/antimatter warp drive, I am not sufficiently ignorant when it comes to language to accept Kirk’s explanation for the “universal translator.” Douglas Adams had the right idea with the Babel fish: just admit that the existence of a technology that could solve the intergalactic language problem is highly improbable and move past it as soon as you can. (The Babel fish seems to work, actually, more or less the way Kirk describes the universal translator working; it’s all about converting one set of brain waves into another.) Any attempt to make the universal translator credible will only draw attention to its utter impossibility and thereby hurt the ball club. And in fact, this episode makes me wish they’d never brought it up; because now, whenever you see them communicating with an alien life form, you have to ask, “Why isn’t anyone pointing a long metal tube at anyone else?”  
  
  
  
Anyway, I guess all in all I would say that I found this episode surprisingly compelling despite its obvious flaws. I’m also very interested by the fact that, although I had forgotten most of it, it appears to have had an influence on the representation of the spirits in [my own crazy fictional universe](http://www.plaidder.com/wof). But that’s another story for another time.   
  
Next up: Honey badger vs. daddy badger.


	38. JOURNEY TO BABEL

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Very important episode for the Spock backstory, introducing Sarek and Amanda and establishing a lot of Spock's emotional baselines. Kind of totally fails as a mystery/political thriller, but then that's not what's important here.

**STARDATE: December 20, 2011**

**JOURNEY TO BABEL**  
 **Written by D. C. Fontana**  
  
It was OK. Seems like it should have been better; but maybe I’m just in a bad mood this month.  
  
 **The Summary:** As the Enterprise orbits Vulcan, McCoy bitches to Kirk about having to put on his dress uniform, helpfully letting everyone know in the process that the Enterprise is ferrying a motley crew of planetary delegates to an important diplomatic conference on a planet “code named Babel” (for extra auspiciousness). The conference is to debate the question of whether a dilithium-rich planet named Corydon should be admitted to the Federation or not. Kirk and McCoy are on their way to do the receiving line thing for the Vulcan delegation, which is being carried aboard via shuttlecraft. They meet Spock at the shuttlebay. With much pomp and circumstance (and recycling of music from “Amok Time”), Ambassador Sarek and his wife Amanda come down the gangplank and are greeted by Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, though only Spock can pull off the Vulcan salute (McCoy makes a half-hearted, embarrassed attempt; Kirk doesn’t even try). Kirk is puzzled by the fact that Ambassador Sarek seems to have some strange aversion to Spock; Sarek ignores Spock’s greeting, won’t speak directly to Spock, and says he wants someone other than Spock to conduct their tour of the ship. (Kirk might well also be puzzled by Ambassador Sarek’s strong resemblance to the Romulan captain he blew up back in “Balance of Terror,” but no doubt he considers this too delicate a topic to bring up.) When he asks Spock if he’d like to stop off on Vulcan for a bit and visit his parents, Spock replies, “Ambassador Sarek and his wife _are_ my parents.” Dun-dun-DUNNNN!!!!  
  
Well, if Kirk thought that his biggest problem on this trip would be figuring out how to get Ambassador Frosty to warm up to his son, he is soon proved wrong. Uhura picks up an illicit coded transmission, which is soon discovered to be coming from a small and infuriatingly agile spacecraft that’s shadowing the Enterprise. Whatever’s receiving the signal appears to be on board ship. So, great, there’s a spy among the delegates. What’s even worse, the snoutfaced delegate who was getting in Sarek’s face about the Corydon question later turns up not only dead but assassinated by a special spinal-crushing technique perfected by Vulcans as a merciful method of execution. (Kirk is informed of this while shirtless in his quarters. Oh, Kirk’s Denuded Torso, how I have missed you! I note that the Wonderous Wrap appears again in this episode; perhaps this is a strike against the theory that the WW was introduced to accommodate Kirk’s girth.) Sarek is the prime suspect; but when Kirk interrogates him, Sarek collapses. Sarek, it transpires, has a serious heart condition; he never told Amanda or Spock because hey, that wouldn’t be logical. So thanks to his super-logical management of his own condition, Sarek is now stuck on the Enterprise and he needs emergency heart surgery and he happens to have T-negative blood which is extremely rare and they don’t have enough blood in the bank to do the surgery but wait! Spock’s T-negative too and he’s happy to take an experimental medication that will allow him to produce extra blood so he can donate gallons and gallons for the operation, even though Sarek’s still treating him like crap in public.   
  
McCoy’s against it—he thinks the stress on Spock would be too much, plus he’s not really sure he’s the best guy to be doing heart surgery on a Vulcan—but as Sarek gets worse, people start coming around to the idea. Just as everyone has finally decided Spock’s right, an Andorian attacks Kirk in the corridor and manages to stab him in the back. With Kirk lying unconscious in sickbay with a punctured lung, Spock’s in command—and he says he can’t do the operation now, because it would be irresponsible to turn command over to Scotty with all the shit that’s going down. Amanda is so angry about this that she slaps him. (You’d think Scotty would be pissed off about it as well, but he never appears in this episode.) Nothing persuades Spock, though, until Kirk wakes up and McCoy fills him in. Kirk says all right, you know and I know we’re not gonna get honey badger to listen to reason, so why don’t we just pretend I’m OK and I’ll go up to the bridge and take over and as soon as you get Spock on the operating table I’ll turn things over to Scotty and everything will be fine.   
  
Naturally as soon as Spock leaves the bridge, that superfast superlight alien ship starts attacking the Enterprise. McCoy’s stuck doing the operation while the ship is under attack; Kirk’s stuck commanding the Enterprise during a battle with a punctured lung. Meanwhile, the “Andorian” (it is revealed that he has been “surgically altered” to look like an Andorian) who stabbed him gets one of his antennae snapped off, revealing the gizmo that’s been receiving the coded transmission. He’s brought up to the bridge, where he gloats and gloats and refuses to answer any questions until the superfast superlight ship is defeated and blows itself up. The “Andorian” reveals that he’s also self-destructing, since he’s already taken his slow-poison suicide pill. He expires before they can drag him off the bridge.  
  
Kirk goes back down to sickbay. Sarek and Spock have both survived the operation and are convalescing. Kirk gets bundled into his own biobed. Spock explains that he realized just before Bones sedated him that the ship was an Orion vessel. The Orions are rogue dilithium dealers, so they want there to be a war over Corydon which will allow them to keep raiding Corydon and also make a killing selling the dilithium to both sides at profiteer prices. But who cares about that bullshit? What about the Vulcan family dynamics? Well, Amanda tries to get Sarek to thank Spock for saving his life; Sarek explains that “one does not thank logic.” In response to Amanda’s outburst, Spock asks his dad why he married his mom; Sarek says, “At the time, it seemed the logical thing to do.” Is this the final banter? No! Wait! There’s more! Kirk accuses Bones of “enjoying” the fact that Spock and Kirk are now his patients; Spock says, “Indeed, I’ve never seen him look so happy,” and Bones tells everyone to shut up and then says, “I finally have the last word.” **END SUMMARY**

  
I expected to like this one more than I did. I mean, it’s all about honey badger, right? But although this episode shows us more about Spock’s family life than we ever knew, it leaves a lot to the imagination. For instance, I don’t have any trouble understanding why human women fall for Vulcan men. They do it for the same reason they fall for Mr. Darcy, Mr. Rochester, Heathcliff, or any other guy whose cold, unpromising, maybe kind of borderline sadistic personality masks (they hope) a furnace of fiery passion which the desiring woman believes she (and she alone!) will be the one to set alight.   
  
What is not explained in this episode (except as a joke) is why a Vulcan would marry a human—or even, really, _how_ a Vulcan would marry a human, since “Amok Time” implies that Vulcan marriages are arranged in childhood. One is forced to assume that Vulcans do in fact have some sort of extremely repressed romantic/erotic desires which occasionally go rogue and attach themselves to non-Vulcans. Certainly this episode strongly implies that Vulcan culture hasn’t so much eliminated emotion as repressed it. Sarek’s treatment of Spock at the beginning of the episode, for instance, can only be explained emotionally; there’s no logical reason why Sarek would be so gratuitously cold and insulting and just plain cruel to his own child. Sure, Spock disregarded his father’s wishes regarding his career; but surely it would be illogical for Sarek to believe that how he treats Spock now will have any bearing on Spock’s choice of career. So what explains Sarek’s frostiness, except for long-simmering resentment? Amanda, though of course she may be deluding herself, seems to believe in the existence of Sarek’s emotions. After Sarek rebukes her for embarrassing Spock by telling McCoy a story about Spock’s childhood pet, Amanda is delighted to perceive that Sarek is “showing an almost human pride” in his son. (I love how any time a Vulcan does something nice it’s because he’s being ‘human’.)  The childhood pet is described by Amanda as “a kind of fat teddy bear,” which of course pleases McCoy no end. Spock later informs McCoy that on Vulcan, “the teddy bears are alive, and have six-inch fangs.”  
  
The big scene is Amanda’s confrontation with Spock over his refusal to relinquish command of the Enterprise. He, of course, presents his decision as an expression of his Vulcanness, reproaching Amanda for not getting it: “How can you have lived on Vulcan, married a Vulcan, raised a son on Vulcan, and still understand so little about what it means to _be_ a Vulcan?” Well, duh, Spock—she’s a woman! Women are emotional, men are rational. Didn’t you know that? Dude, it’s so totally literalized in your own family setup, it’s not even funny—it’s like all your emotions are coded into your frickin’ X chromosome. Anyway, that scene might have worked better if Amanda had been played either by a better actress or by the same actress in a less distracting “old lady” wig and makeup. Despite her passionate appeal to him to acknowledge his humanity, and her despondent cry that “there must be something of me in you,” the only moment at which I really felt much comes after she slaps him and leaves, and Spock walks up to the door that’s just closed on her and puts a hand against it—as if he’s trying to meld with her, though he surely knows that there’s nothing on the other side of that door. Snif.    
  
And while I’m on the subject: does anyone else think it’s weird that the alien culture that denies the existence of emotion is the same culture that trains people to telepathically merge with each other to the point where personal boundaries dissolve and the two become one, thus enabling a level of emotional intimacy of which us poor humans can only dream?  
  
As for Sarek not thanking “logic”—does anyone really believe that logic ever really came into Spock’s decision making during the medical saga? Spock offers himself for this operation knowing that there’s a good chance it’ll kill him and that there’s a not inconsiderable chance that Sarek will die anyway, since McCoy’s the one wielding the knife. Then he refuses to do the operation once he has command—because he’s logically chosen the good of the many over the good of the one? Yeah, tell that to Sarek, Spock. We know you just can’t bring yourself to let down That Man on the Bridge, especially when That Man On The Bridge is all stabbed and lung-punctured and helpless with a big ol’ bandage round his denuded torso. And, OK, let’s say I believe you about the good of the many—it’s still all part of your desperate attempt to gain your father’s approval, or at least so I surmise from your asking Amanda “what my father would think” if he came to and heard that Spock had jeopardized the ship just to save Sarek’s individual ass.  
  
It was interesting to me that when McCoy explains to Spock that he’s never done surgery on a Vulcan and that he’s not sure he can pull this off, Spock never says anything along the lines of, say, “I trust you, Doctor.” No, McCoy waits in vain for the kind of grudging acknowledgment of his worth that McCoy himself has several times handed out to Spock at moments of crisis; McCoy is the “logical” choice for this operation only because there’s nobody else on board the Enterprise who’d be any better at it. Although…  
  
All right. Someone, before this episode aired, should have taken Fonatana aside, perhaps along with Coon and Roddenberry, and said, “Look. Let’s just determine, once and for all, how much McCoy really knows about Vulcan physiology.”   
  
Because it’s insane the way they wound up writing it. McCoy is capable of performing heart surgery on Sarek—successfully—while the ship is lurching hither and yon and the equipment is shorting itself out and all kinds of other things are happening. But when the operation starts, and Nurse Chapel reports that Sarek’s blood pressure is 90/40, McCoy mutters, “I wish I knew whether that was good or bad.” COME ON! You’re doing _heart surgery_ on a guy and you don’t know what his blood pressure’s supposed to be? For Christ’s sake, Bones, before you open a guy’s chest wall, LOOK THAT SHIT UP! It’s not like he’s a Vaalian or a Horta or something. The Vulcans are in the Federation. Presumably there’s information sharing going on. Use the @#$! Google!  
  
But of course, for Fontana, there was no Google. The strange case of McCoy’s impossibly uneven knowledge of “Vulcan physiology”—sometimes he seems to know all about weird Vulcan health things, at other times it’s like he wouldn’t be able to find Spock’s ass with both hands and a flashlight—may just be a function of the writing team’s ignorance regarding medical matters, or it may be driven purely by narrative concerns. But it may also be an artifact of a time when you had to carry everything around in your head because unless you were in a library or near a mainframe computer, there was no ‘looking up.’ Though the writers are all just wrapping their minds around the concept of the searchable database—the characters often do ask the computer to search for and correlate information—consulting the computer is still something of an extraordinary event. McCoy is given all kinds of fancy medical technology in sickbay, but the existence of this technology has no effect on how the writers conceive of what it means to be a doctor. McCoy shows us the ideal doctor as the ultimate generalist—someone who can treat anyone or anything under any circumstances precisely because his skill as a doctor is _not_ limited by what he actually knows.   
  
Anyhow. As I search for reasons why this episode did not speak to me, it occurs to me that it may be because there’s too much else going on. In “Amok Time,” Sturgeon doesn’t put anything into the plot to compete with ponn farr. He was confident enough in his own skill at character development to hang the entire episode on Spock’s personal life and trust that that story alone would be compelling enough to support the entire episode. Fontana doesn’t seem to have had that confidence; in fact, she keeps piling on plots as the episode goes along. First there’s the political plot. Then there’s the espionage plot. Then there’s a murder mystery. The murder mystery part is particularly annoying to me because it sets up expectations that nobody has any intention of fulfilling. There’s no investigation, for instance; as soon as Kirk starts one, the episode suddenly becomes a medical drama. We find the murderer only because the murderer is fool enough to attack Kirk next (in, I would note, a hallway down which any number of crew members or diplomats could have come strolling at any moment). By the way, the “Andorian” is subjected to some sort of truth serum, so evidently the Federation is OK with using drugs during interrogation, though they turn up their noses at the Klingons’ “mind-sifter”—though in fairness to the Federation it must be pointed out that their truth drugs don’t seem to actually work.  
  
Anyway, my point was that perhaps the reason this episode didn’t hook me emotionally the way some of the other Spock-centric ones have is that Fontana just didn’t have the confidence or maybe the desire to go balls-out on character development and make this a story about the dynamics of a highly unusual family—instead of a story about intergalactic diplomacy, espionage, murder, medicine, AND the dynamics of a highly unusual family.  
  
Or perhaps for Fontana, this was an episode about Kirk’s awesomeness. Kirk seems genuinely distressed by Sarek’s treatment of Spock and the hurt that he knows this is causing him. Although—all right, let’s just take a minute here. McCoy’s not the only one whose knowledge of matters Vulcan is impossibly uneven. In this episode, Fontana makes Kirk completely ignorant regarding Spock’s background. Kirk, in this episode, has no idea who Spock’s parents are; even the fact that Sarek is an ambassador married to a human doesn’t clue him in. All right, so, “these ARE my parents” is a great little moment—except that it’s completely fucking impossible. And while a one-time writer might have committed this impossibility through ignorance, Fontana’s deliberately violating continuity for the sake of dramatic effect. She, after all, is the one who did the rewrite job on “This Side of Paradise,” in which Spock informs Kirk during the race-baiting scene that his father is an ambassador and his mother is a teacher. In “Amok Time,” Kirk says that he “knew Spock’s family was connected” but didn’t realize they were connected to fucking _T’Pau_ already. Which implies that he knows enough about honey badger’s family to know who his frickin’ parents are.  But I digress.  
  
Back to the topic of Kirk’s awesomeness.  So, Kirk tries and fails to show off his beloved honey badger’s excellent qualities to Ambassador Frosty; he talks to Spock’s mother about how “stubborn” Spock and his dad both are; and of course once he understands the situation he’s perfectly willing to walk around with a punctured lung pretending he’s not in excruciating pain or drowning in blood coming into his lung through the reopened wound or anything like that in order to help Spock and Sarek bond in this peculiarly and rather vampirically literal way. Kirk waltzes onto the bridge with that impish Kirkly grin and manages to convince a somewhat suspicious Spock that he’s just fine; and when the other ship attacks, he grimly hangs on through the pain to get his ship out of danger. It’s interesting that although Kirk thinks Spock is being totally unreasonable for not wanting to turn the ship over to Scotty, he himself wouldn’t dream of doing same once the attack begins.   
  
What’s weird to me, in the midst of Kirk’s glowing heroics, is how needlessly hostile his interactions with Uhura are. When they’re trying to figure out where the transmission is being received, Uhura makes some sort of mistake in configuring her sensors or something, and Kirk flips out on her. When he heroically struggles onto the bridge after his stabbing, Uhura reacts with surprise and concern, even though of course nothing’s written for her character. Kirk doesn’t even look at her; he sweeps right past her to the captain’s chair. I know Nichols hated Shatner. Shatner claims in one of his ghostwritten things that he had no idea at the time. But I wonder. Shatner typically doesn’t interact with or acknowledge Nichols’s presence unless the script forces him to do it. He doesn’t pay attention to her reactions, and he doesn’t give her anything in response. If I were given to unfounded speculation I would say that this odd Kirk/Uhura dynamic is an expression of Shatner’s selfishness as an actor; he doesn’t want the focus shifting off him, so he doesn’t do anything to help the other actors get into the scene. Or maybe, you know, he just can't hear her over the sound of how awesome he is.  
  
On the other hand, Kirk yelling at Uhura is something that the writers keep putting into the scripts. I first noticed it in “The Naked Time,” when Kirk just about snaps over Riley’s continued renditions of “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen.” There, at least, she gets to snap back and they both apologize to each other. But in a lot of other episodes you’ll see Kirk asking Uhura to contact someone, Uhura being unable to do it, and Kirk snapping at her, and nobody apologizes. So maybe this is just a replication of what, in the late 1960s, was probably the entirely unremarkable phenomenon of the boss who’s mad about something at work taking it out on his secretary because, hey, she’s a woman, and she's right there.   
  
Anyway, so, once again a D. C. Fontana episode underwhelms me. Up next…I believe it is “Friday’s Child.”


	39. FRIDAY'S CHILD

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which McCoy delivers a baby, and...I'll just let the review do it.

**STARDATE: January 18, 2012**

**FRIDAY’S CHILD**  
 **Written by D. C. Fontana**  
  
There are some downsides to this one. However, there is also a most unexpected upside, and its name is Julie Newmar.  
  
 **The Summary** : McCoy, Spock, and Kirk are down in the briefing room watching McCoy’s old home movies. No, wait, those are tapes of McCoy’s time with the Kapellans, a warlike primitive race that happens—don’t you love how this always happens?—to be sitting on top of some really valuable minerals that both the Federation and the Klingons need to build their space colonies. McCoy happens to have done a stint on a medical team that was sent to the Kapellans for outreach. They didn’t stay long—the Kapellans believe that only the strong should survive, so they see medicine as antisocial and counterproductive—but at least McCoy got to learn something about the culture, which he will now put to use in the service of the Federation’s attempt to establish a mining treaty with the Kapellans. Our three heroes, accompanied by a redshirt, beam on down, leaving Scotty in command of the Enterprise.   
  
Well, the landing party shows up, they ask to be taken to the Kapellans’ leader, but before that happens darned if they don’t see a Klingon in the Kapellans’ midst. Mr. Redshirt is so startled by this that he yells “KLINGON!” and draws his phaser; his chest, after some very clumsy editing, is pierced by the Kapellans’ special flying deadly weapon, and he expires. So this diplomatic mission is off to a rollicking start.  
  
Kirk et al. turn over their weapons and communicators as a sign of good faith and are eventually granted an audience with the Ti’er, the Grand High Poobah of the Kapellans. Ak-aar, as I believe his name is, is getting on in years, but he has a hot young wife named Eleen who’s pregnant. Mohrab, who seems to see himself as the next Ti’er, has already struck a deal with the Klingon, and an argument ensues during which McCoy’s knowledge of Kapellan culture comes in handy. Before any decision is made, however, Mohrab and his partisans attack and kill the Ti’er. Eleen, since she’s now carrying a rival to the new ruler, is for the chop. As the knife descends, Kirk pulls her out of harm’s way, which of course means that he’s now violated the taboo about touching a Ti’er’s wife and therefore has to die.  
  
They can’t contact the Enterprise without their communicators; but it wouldn’t help anyway because Scotty has abandoned the landing party down on the planet to respond to a distress call from a Federation freighter under attack from a Klingon ship. McCoy decides to examine Eleen, whose arm got burned during the scuffle, in order to provide a distraction that will allow Kirk and Spock to overpower the guards. Kirk, after extracting from Eleen the admission that she would all in all prefer to live, drags her along on their escape. They head deep into the Vasques Rocks, I’m sorry, deep into the Kapellan hill country and barricade themselves into a defensible rock formation. While Kirk and Spock do their tactical type stuff, McCoy decides to examine Eleen for real this time. He touches her arm; she slaps his face. He touches it again; she slaps him again; he slaps her back.  
  
And what do you think happens after McCoy socks Eleen in the head? Guess. Go on, guess.  
  
Did you guess “Eleen falls in love with McCoy?” Give yourself a cigar!  
  
I swear to God it’s as if the only movie these writers have ever seen is _The Quiet Man_. Why not just have an old Kapellan crone stagger up the hill waving a blackthorn and croaking, “Here’s a stick to beat the pretty lady with”?  
  
But I digress.  
  
So. Eleen decides that “Mac-Coy,” as she calls him, is now the only man who can touch her. Well, at least now McCoy can deliver the baby. Since McCoy seems to believe that in order to give birth to the baby, Eleen has to _want_ the baby (in the future, the abortion debate will be rendered moot as women learn to terminate their pregnancies merely by not wanting them), he tries to coach her to think of the child as hers rather than her husband’s. The way he does this is to tell her to keep repeating “The child is mine.” She says yes, McCoy, the child IS yours. Despite McCoy’s best efforts the misreading is never corrected, and after the baby is “born,” Eleen persists in referring to him as “our” child. (Spock and Kirk are duly alarmed.) Then, while McCoy is dozing, Eleen whacks him with a rock and runs off, sticking him with the baby.  
  
I should point out that while all this is going on, the Enterprise gets to the origin point of the distress call and finds nothing there. Though Scotty at length comes to the conclusion that the call was faked by the Klingons to decoy them away from the planet, they stay out there for a long time to make reeeeeeally sure.  
  
Turns out Eleen’s plan is to find Mohrab and the warriors who are in hot pursuit of the “Earth men” and tell them that she killed them all and that the child is dead. The Klingon for some reason doubts her story. This causes him to lose face because the Kapellans, despite their other faults, are sticklers about honesty, and to doubt the word of the wife of a Ti’er, well, it is Not Done. But the Klingon, who has surreptitiously stolen a phaser off the body of a dying Kapellan guard, charges up the hill to verify Eleen’s story. The first Kapellan who tries to stop him gets zapped. Kirk then shoots an arrow—did I mention that he and Spock have made bows and arrows out of the surrounding trees? Well, they have—into the Klingon’s knee. The Klingon waves his phaser around and taunts everyone. Mohrab, having pardoned Eleen, steps forward to challenge him, knowing that he will be toast—and he is. However, moments after phasering Mohrab, the Klingon is gutted with another Special Flying Kapellan Thing. Scotty and a security team finally show up, and the Kapellans surrender.  
  
Back on the Enterprise, we learn that the Federation has just signed a mining treaty with Eleen, who is now effectively the new Kapellan leader. In theory she is ruling as regent on behalf of her child, whose name is…Leonard James Ak-aar. Spock is disturbed to learn this. McCoy and Kirk talk about what a nice ring it has as a name; when asked for his opinion, Spock replies, “I think you’re both going to be insufferably pleased with yourselves for about a month. Sir.” **END SUMMARY**

  
Somewhere in the Big Book of TV there must be a secret law written which dictates that at some point before a show ends there absolutely has to be an episode in which one of the characters delivers a baby. At least in this case it makes some sense because McCoy is in fact a doctor, though I continue to be amazed at how strongly the future medical profession has reacted against specialization. In addition to being an expert on contagious diseases, surgery on everything from Vulcans to Hortas, and “space psychology,” McCoy is now all of a sudden an ob-gyn. Anyway, it’s nice to see an episode written around McCoy for a change. Kirk and Spock are _almost_ moved out of the way of the McCoy/Eleen plot; they spend most of their time trying to defend the hideout against the Injuns, I’m sorry, the Kapellans. Kirk retains his reputation as the worst diplomat the Federation ever produced; he is in trouble from the word go down there, and has to be constantly stopped by Kirk and Spock from digging himself in deeper. But of course, it turns out that the Kapellans don’t respect diplomacy anyway, so ironically it’s only after the diplomatic mission has been irretrievably fucked up that the Kapellans start to take a fancy to these Earthlings. Kirk earns his first tiny crumb of respect by offering, after his attempt at grandstanding has failed as it always does, to settle the question by fighting the Klingon hand to hand. At the end, even Mohrab has come around after seeing what a great job these scrappy Earth men do of eluding pursuit and evading recapture.   
  
This episode is more than usually polluted by the generic conventions of the Western; Kirk even makes a reference to the cavalry coming over the hill. The Kapellans are as noble and as savage as a noble savage gets. By the time he and Spock are making homemade bows and arrows, all you can do is laugh about it. The Klingons, once again, are put down as being brutal but not brave; and once again, a third world country makes the right decision about which world power to become a subsidiary of.  
  
So about that baby.  
  
I’m just going to skip my rant about the way childbirth is represented on TV. You all understand, I’m sure, how much bitter laughter is provoked in me by things like, say, the fact that Eleen gives birth without messing up her clothes, the fact that even though it’s been established that they don’t have any water someone has clearly given the baby a bath before its closeup, the fact that Eleen’s labor takes about 5 minutes and there’s no real screaming and it is done lying down on a rock as if she were in a Western hospital instead of squatting as it would surely have been typically done in her own society, and the fact that within about an hour after giving birth Eleen is scampering down a rocky hillside as if nothing at all had happened.   
  
The idea that what women really want is a man strong enough to dominate them is also, alas, not new to this series; we saw it in “Space Seed” and we will undoubtedly see it again.   
  
What _is_ interesting to me is the fact that it is precisely _because_ McCoy is a doctor that he is willing to treat Eleen with enough contempt to make her fall in love with him. Eleen, initially, is completely on board with her culture’s gender rules and one of my favorite moments in this episode is the one when Eleen looks at Kirk and says she wants to see him die for touching her. Eleen, incidentally, is played by Julie Newmar, who made her mark on the Adam West _Batman_ series as Catwoman. Newmar also appears in two _Twilight Zone_ episodes; in both she was instantly recognizable. In this episode, I didn’t know it was her until I saw the credits. Instead of thinking, “hey, that’s Julie Newmar,” I was thinking, “Wow, this female guest star is really a cut above the usual crap.” Newmar may not have been the world’s most sophisticated actress but she definitely had presence, and presence is about the only thing Eleen really needs. As played by her, Eleen is beautiful in a very different way from the typical Star Trek female lead--and also something much more unusual for this show, which is intimidating. That is, until she falls for McCoy.  
  
So, as I was saying: McCoy knows about the taboo on touching Eleen but he violates it anyway because he’s a doctor. Because he’s a doctor, he knows that he has an absolute right to touch a patient even if the patient doesn’t want to be touched. Because he’s a doctor, in fact, it is his duty to slug a patient if that’s what it takes to get the patient to comply with his instructions:  
  
 **KIRK: How is it you’re able to touch her? You give her a happy pill?**  
 **MCCOY: No, a right cross.**  
 **KIRK: That’s not in any medical book I know of.**  
 **MCCOY: It’s in mine from now on.**  
  
So it’s because McCoy is a doctor that he can be brutal enough to win Eleen over without marking himself as an abuser. I find this fascinating.

  
Somewhat more pukeworthy is the way McCoy is able to tell that Eleen’s about to go into labor just by putting a hand on her stomach. When Eleen asks how he knows, McCoy says, “Because I’m a doctor.” “Even the women of our village cannot tell so much with a touch,” she says. It’s all right, Eleen; neither can the doctors of my village. We still don’t know what causes women to go into labor, though we can crudely mimic the process; and there’s a lot of other shit we don’t know about pregnancy and labor. I suppose in the future all these mysteries might be revealed; but I still doubt that we will reach the point where a pat on the tummy will tell us all.  
  
The whole falling-in-love-with-the-ob thing was strangely familiar to me from the reading we did about childbirth before the Great Event. Dr. Bradley’s book on natural childbirth, in particular—don’t go there, ladies, he was BATSHIT CRAZY—spends a lot of time talking about how the fathers often get jealous of the doctors because the mothers get so attached to them. The same hormone that makes labor happen is involved in orgasm, and in natural childbirth there is, according to some commentators, a phenomenon referred to sometimes as a “babygasm” in which at the moment of delivery pain becomes indistinguishable from sexual pleasure. I have no idea whether this is true or not; but it seems to have been part of Fontana’s babylore, because there’s a moment when Eleen starts to kind of look a little orgasmic and McCoy says, “Uh-oh,” and starts to get ready with the catcher’s mitt.  
  
Anyway, all that is, of course, very retro, and that is of course about what we can expect at this point. I find that I do not enjoy Fontana’s episodes as much as I sort of hope that I will. I’m trying to figure out why, and so far I have figured out two possibilities:  
  
1) Fontana’s writing of the Spock/McCoy/Kirk triangle appears to have been infected by cuteness. Perhaps the low point here is when McCoy is holding the baby and going “ootchie cootchie cootchie coo!” “Ootchie cootchie cootchie coo?” Spock observes. “Yes, an obscure Earth dialect,” Kirk says. “Ootchie cootchie cootchie coo. If you’re curious, consult linguistics.” All right, so Fontana thought it’d be funny to make the three leads stand around repeating “ootchie cootchie cootchie coo.” Fine. It’s sort of amusing…the first time. Then there’s McCoy trying to get Spock to hold the baby; I will admit that Spock receives it in a way that perfectly mimics the way a lot of men hold babies when first handed them, and that this is somewhat funny. But ultimately I guess it starts to grate on me, perhaps because in this episode Spock is the odd man out as the only one who doesn’t come out of this episode without having in some metaphorical way fathered Eleen’s child.  
  
2) Her stage managing is crap.  
  
It’s odd for someone whose main job is to patch up other people’s scripts; but the way she handles the B plot involving the Enterprise is very sloppy. The distress call comes in. Scotty hauls the Enterprise all the way to the middle of nowhere. Only when they get to the middle of nowhere does it occur to Scotty that the distress call mentions the Enterprise by name, and the freighter shouldn’t have known the Enterprise was even in the area. Clearly, it takes him that long to cop to this only because it is necessary to get the ship out of the way. Then, when he has his epiphany, you think OK, they’re going back now to get there in the nick of time. But then Uhura says, “But it might also be a real distress call,” and Scotty says, well, we’ll stay here for a while and make sure. Oh, come on. He’s already sure. Why add the bogus extra wait? Not only is it not plausible, it undermines your whole attempt to create tension. Just move the scene later if you’re worried about making sure the Enterprise doesn’t get there too early. It’d be better in every way to have them turn around instantly and rush back.   
  
There’s only one thing good that comes out of this part of the episode. The Enterprise picks up another distress call after it turns around—this one from another starship. Scotty, explaining why he’s ignoring it, says this:  
  
 **SCOTTY: There’s an old Earth saying, Mr. Sulu: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.**  
  
And then she has to ruin it by bringing Chekov in: “I know this saying. It was inwented in Russia.”  
  
Ah well. Up next: “The Deadly Years.”


	40. THE DEADLY YEARS

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is sobering to realize that this is already at 100,000+ words, and I'm not even done with Season Two. I wish all nonfiction were this easy to write.
> 
> "Deadly Years" is easy to parody, but if you can get past the extremely naïve "old" makeup it is also legitimately scary. When you're in your forties, anyway, there's nothing scarier than aging.

**STARDATE: January 20, 2012**

**THE DEADLY YEARS**  
 **Written by Philip P. Harmon**  
  
My memories of this one were quite vivid. So vivid I’ve kind of been putting off watching it again. But it was all right.  
  
 **The Summary:** Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Chekhov, and Lt. Galway beam down to Gamma Hydra IV for a routine check-in with the staff of the ‘experimental colony’ there. It seems like rather a lot of people and an unusually high quotient of senior officers to take down there for a routine visit, but hey, there they are, and wondering where everyone is. Chekhov goes into a darkened room, turns on the lights, and discovers a dead body which looks about 350 years old. He screams, freaks out, runs away, and so on. The grownups eventually go into the room to see what spooked Junior, and are marveling at the dead body when the colony’s two remaning survivors show up. Both look about 85, but chronologically speaking are in their late 20s. Clearly something has gone wrong here.  
  
They take the two survivors up, but they are aging at a lethally rapid rate, and McCoy is unable to reverse the effect. Kirk holds a briefing about this which introduces Commodore Stockard of Starfleet Command—I’m sure there’s some explanation for why he’s on the ship, but I missed it—and Dr. Janet Wallace, an endocrinologist (so, evidently, in the future, the WOMEN doctors will specialize while the men remain generalists) who will be helping McCoy work on finding the cause and the cure. It is a matter of some urgency, because the members of the landing party turn out to have all been bitten by the geezer bug. Kirk, strutting around with a denuded torso in his quarters, notices a twinge and reports to sickbay; a suddenly grayer McCoy tells him he has advanced arthritis. Scotty shows up; he’s gone totally white. Lt. Galway is croning before their very eyes. The Spock’s aging too, but since Vulcans have special badass longevity he’s not decrepitizing as fast. only one who remains unaffected is Chekov, who’s still fresh as a daisy and as annoying as ever. They remain in orbit around the planet while trying to figure out WTF is going on. Commodore Stockard thinks they should go to Starbase 10 where there are better facilities; but to do that they’d have to cross the Romulan neutral zone, which Kirk doesn’t fancy doing at this time.  
  
Well, of course Dr. Wallace turns out to be an old flame of Kirk’s who dumped him and married another guy because of her career. At any rate, it’s good she has an incentive to find a cure for this because Kirk is not in good shape. It is a feature of this disease that the brain ages faster than the body, so that Kirk starts showing symptoms of senile dementia while he’s still apparently hale and hearty. Dr. Wallace tries to rekindle the flames a little bit, but Kirk, who’s now gray and balding and lined but still self-aware enough to realize it, turns her down: “What are you offering me, Janet? Love, or a going-away present?” (In the future, the phrase “pity fuck” will have fallen out of use.)  
  
Well, they figure out that the problem is caused by radiation from a comet’s tail through which Gamma Hydra IV has passed; but they’re no closer to a solution, despite having subjected Chekhov to a constant round of medical tests which he finds very humiliating. As Kirk becomes increasingly senile, he starts forgetting shit, repeating orders, and so on. Commodore Stockard decides it’s time to relieve Kirk of command. He enlists Spock’s help, which is reluctantly given; they convene a competency hearing which is extremely painful for all concerned. A humiliated and delusional Kirk is removed from command; since Spock and Scotty are also unfit to do much, Stockard takes command. Sadly, Stockard has never held a field command, as he proves by ordering the Enterprise to just go sailing across the neutral zone. They do; and pretty soon they’re surrounded by Romulan ships and under attack while Stockard stares at the viewing screen like he’s a deer and it’s a semi.  
  
Down in sickbay, Kirk gets over his sense of betrayal long enough to make one last-ditch effort to figure out WTF Chekov escaped the scourge. They eventually remember that Chekov was freaked out by the sight of the body, and McCoy hypothesizes that the surge of adrenalin may have protected him. Dr. Wallace works up a quick and dirty serum which, Spock melodramatically informs everyone, “could cure or kill.” Kirk volunteers to go first; after some argument, Spock agrees. While Stockard continues to work on his Total Combat Fail, Kirk writhes in agony.  
  
Stockard finally comes up with a plan, which is to surrender. Chekov informs him that the Romulans don’t take prisoners. Suddenly, Rejuvenated Kirk busts on in and takes over. Informed by Sulu that they’re surrounded by about 10 Romulan ships, Kirk sends a message to Starfleet using a code he knows the Romulans have broken announcing that since they are about to self-destruct the ship using the “corbomite device recently installed,” they should keep all Starfleet ships clear of this sector for 4 solar years, cause that’s one badass explosion. The Romulan ships, who have of course picked this up, start backing off; the Enterprise blasts through the zone at Warp 8 before they can get back on its tail. Kirk makes it up with Stockard, who’s a lot nicer now that he’s totally had his nuts cut off, fried up, and handed back to him dusted with a little paprika and cracked pepper. “Steady as she goes,” he says, looking into Janet Wallace’s loving eyes. “Steady as she goes,” answers Sulu. “I thought I said that,” says Kirk. Ha ha, **the end.**  
  
This episode scared me when I was a kid. I knew nothing of mortality, of course; but I did have grandmothers. My maternal grandmother had bad rheumatoid arthritis for the whole time I knew her, and by the end of her life was fairly disabled. At the time I was first making the acquaintance of Star Trek, my paternal grandmother was doing all right; but she eventually started losing her mind and the end of her life was very lonely and sad. For quite a few years, her short-term memory was totally shot but she could function otherwise; you’d have a conversation, she’d enjoy it, then ten minutes you’d have it again. You could entertain yourself by saying different things during the second or third go-round just to see what it would change. Anyway, it was sad watching her deteriorate; and that sadness is clearly where this plot came from. The focus is largely on Kirk—because he’s the only one who has to actually be relieved of command, though you’d think that it might be actually more important to relieve Scotty. With Kirk, however, there’s the Added Pathos of his losing his attractiveness to women—something evidently not considered an issue for McCoy, Spock, or Scotty. And of course there’s the extra pain of having to watch Spock be the adult child who has to take dad’s keys away.  
  
The pain is still pretty painful. The bridge crew tries to cover for Kirk as long as they can; but at the hearing, they’re clearly embarrassed and depressed by his behavior, and intensely uncomfortable at having to witness his self-humiliation. The little scene in which Kirk asks an equally uncomfortable Janet Wallace if he’s really getting old is as hard to watch now as it was then. The competency hearing makes you feel how destructive pity really is; they’re all feeling it, and it just drives Kirk mad to see it on their faces. Kirk’s confrontation with Spock after the hearing is also quite painful. “I would never have believed it of you,” he says to Spock in the hearing room; and Spock doesn’t really believe it of himself, either. Though he clearly can see that he himself is no longer fit, he resists the idea of removing Kirk from command as long as he can. In Kirk’s quarters afterward, Kirk calls Spock treasonous, disloyal, etc.,  but stops short of breaking out old-guy racism; it ends with him telling Spock to just get out “so I don’t have to look at you”—or, one might surmise, so Kirk doesn’t say things they won’t be able to forget later. In fact, though Kirk goes muttering his paranoid mutterings about how Spock’s always wanted his own command and just stabbed him in the back to get it and grumble grumble, he stops cold when Spock tells him that he hasn't actually taken command—because THAT makes him REALLY upset. Though he acts as if he doesn’t know how bad he’s getting, you suspect at that moment that on some level Kirk does understand what’s happening, and that although he can’t personally accept it, he knows it might really make sense for Spock to take over. But putting a @#$! ADMINISTRATOR in his chair—THAT’S a different story.  
  
I have to say I find the commodore’s total incompetence when faced with a battle situation somewhat hard to believe. _I_ would do a better job in that situation than this guy does. However, who cares, because it sets up a highly satisfying dramatic payoff. It’s gratifying to see Sulu, Chekov, and Uhura schooling their incompetent substitute teacher on how shit goes down during an engagement with the Romulans; and it really does do one’s heart good to see Kirk waltz back in and pull the ol' Corbomite Maneuver out of his ass. It’s even more satisfying because they have cleverly set it up so that at first there is just a whisper of uncertainty as to whether Kirk knows what he’s doing. One of the signs that Kirk is losing it is that he asks Uhura to send a transmission to Starbase 10 using “code 2;” as Uhura has to remind him, the Romulans have already broken code 2 so they can't use it any more. So, when Kirk comes back and discovers the straits they’re in, and asks Uhura to send a message to Starfleet using Code 2, everyone’s all antsy. But Uhura does it; and of course as soon as he says the word “corbomite” everyone can relax—all except Commodore Stockard, who of course hasn’t seen Season One. Sulu even almost smiles. And though it’s understated, it’s a landmark moment in the development of the show: AT LAST, we have continuity, and the characters can actually remember what’s happened from one episode to the next. (They don’t go overboard with it, though. When asked during the competency hearing if Kirk has ever before had trouble making decisions, Sulu doesn’t answer, “Well, there was that time he got split in two by the transporter and he almost left me to freeze to death down on the Planet of the Unicorn Dogs.”)  
  
I find, however, that it doesn’t scare me as much as it used to, despite the fact that now, I am aging—at an accelerated rate even, thanks to the loss of my ovaries—and I know how much it sucks. Probably it’s partly because I now understand that what they do to make these guys look old has nothing to do with how real aging works. Sure, Kirk gets gray, they start coming his hair back, he’s got wrinkles, he’s grumpy. But his body’s exactly the same as it always was, and Shatner can’t always remember that he’s supposed to have advanced arthritis. Instead of getting older, these guys basically just get whiter. It’s sort of as if Brecht was directing a play by Beckett. But I guess the thing is that to me, the scary thing about aging is not that it’s swift and deadly and spectacular but that it is gradual and ordinary and the price of living. A form of aging which is caused by radiation and can be cured by adrenaline is infinitely less frightening than the simple passage of time. These guys may think they’ve been cured; but like the man says, “You’re on earth! There’s no cure for that!”  
  
So I suppose the thing is that this episode is actually written, in a way, more from the perspective of the child who is forced to _watch_ the parents age rather than from the perspective of the aging parents themselves. So it’s still painful, but less scary than it used to be, back when I would lie there in my grandmother’s spare bedroom trying to fall asleep and feeling guilty about how uncomfortable it made me to hear my grandmother crying with the pain as she tried to fall asleep in the next room.  
  
Speaking of adrenaline, it’s a good episode for McCoy, who seems to have preemptively embraced his inner Old Coot, and therefore takes the whole aging thing a lot better than Kirk does. He’s still sharp, decrepit as he gets, and it’s good to see him racking the ol’ brain and finally scraping up the answer. Nimoy, as usual, does a good job with Spock’s complex but understated emotions; it’s oddly touching to see Spock down in sickbay asking McCoy if he can do anything about the fact that he’s all of a sudden freezing all the time. One does as always wonder why McCoy couldn't have figured this out earlier; but one must not expect too much.  
  
I should also say that I am grateful that someone, somehow, prevented this episode from doing a "look at my legs" thing with the female lieutenant who is the first to die from oldness. She is of course more overtly upset than the guys are, and fearful about her upcoming death; but at least there isn't any freaking out over losing her looks. The old love interest thing is also handled with odd restraint. For once Dr. Wallace, if you ignore her wig and costumes, looks more like a doctor than a model; and until we get to that awful moment when Kirk's asking her to lie to him about how virile he is, his interactions with her are more mature than usual (ha ha).  
  
Next up: “Obsession,” an episode about which I remember just about nothing.


	41. OBSESSION

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kirk is distracted by the smell of honey. And no, it's not coming from honey badger.

**STARDATE: January 23, 2012**

**OBSESSION**  
 **Written by Art Wallace**  
  
I can see why I don’t remember anything about this one. Actually there may have been a few trace memories in there, though it is easy to confuse this with other Star Trek episodes involving amorphous cloud creatures.  
  
 **The Summary:** While doing a mining survey of a new planet, Kirk suddenly starts smelling something like honey. He flips out and sends the security team out to look for something he seems to think is made of dicoronium, an element that Spock points out only exists in laboratory experiments. A cloud of dry ice which has been sneaking up on them finally pounces on the security team, leaving only one alive long enough to call Kirk and report the attack. Kirk and Spock arrive to discover all three redshirts lying on the ground covered with white makeup. “You’ll find every red corpuscle gone from their bodies,” says Kirk. Asked whether he knows what this thing is, Kirk says, “It’s something that can’t possibly exist…but it does.” Dun dun DUNNNNN!!  
  
Kirk refuses to leave orbit until he has hunted down and killed the White Whale, I’m sorry, the cloud vampire. This despite the fact that there’s a colony somewhere waiting for a load of highly perishable vaccines which are currently aboard the USS Yorktown, with which they are supposed to rendezvous in 8 hours. Kirk takes down Ensign Garrovik, the new head of security since the last one got drained by the cloud vampire, and a couple more redshirts to track the thing down; they split up, and the thing attacks Garrovik’s party, draining the other two redshirts. In a briefing afterward Kirk extracts from Garrovik the admission that he hesitated a couple seconds before firing on the cloud creature; Kirk relieves him of duty and confines him to quarters.   
  
McCoy and Spock are alarmed by all of this. In response to their questions, Kirk keeps telling them to check the tapes on the USS Farragut. McCoy’s too busy autopsying bloodless redshirts to do it, so Spock gives him the summary: Eleven years earlier, when Kirk was serving on the Farragut as a young lieutenant, they encountered a cloudlike creature which had the same honey smell and which destroyed half the crew including Captain Garrovik (yes, Ensign Garrovik’s father), to whom the young Kirk was evidently very much attached. Kirk has been carrying around a crushing load of guilt about this because he was the first to see the cloud creature and he hesitated momentarily before firing on it; he is convinced that if he had fired immediately he would have saved everyone.   
  
Well, McCoy and Spock go down to Kirk’s quarters and confront him. Though he’s been acting batshit crazy on the bridge, Kirk is surprisingly reasonable in responding to their questions about WTF he thinks he’s doing. His insistence that Cloudy Dick is an intelligent creature rather than a chemical phenomenon is based on his subjective impressions from 11 years ago; he believes that he felt a ‘presence’ while the cloud was attacking. Spock and McCoy are skeptical. Whatever, it’s a moot point, because Cloudy Dick has been spotted on the sensor scan and it is in fact leaving the planet and traveling into space. The Enterprise gives chase at warp 8, causing Scotty grievous anxiety. At long last, Kirk agrees with most bitter reluctance to slow down to warp 6. At that point, Cloudy Dick turns and attacks. Kirk fires phasers and photon torpedoes; they have no effect whatsoever. The thing then infiltrates the ship through one of the engine vents, getting into the ventilation system.  
  
Spock, now convinced of Cloudy Dick’s intelligence, explains to Kirk that logically it is clear that he was not responsible for the deaths on the Farragut, since a full-on attack with everything the Enterprise has got had zero effect. Kirk tells him to tell that to someone else. Taking the hint, Spock heads down to Garrovik’s quarters. Garrovik is in a bad mood; when Nurse Chapel brought his dinner earlier, he flung the dish cover at the wall, striking the vent valve and jamming it. Spock comes in and starts explaining that Garrovik’s hesitation seems to be a hereditary trait of the species and he shouldn’t feel bad about it when all of a sudden THE SMELL! OMG THE SMELL! Sure enough, Cloudy Dick is sneaking in through the vent Garrovik jammed open. Honey badger hurls Garrovik through the doors and runs over to the vent; since he can’t close it, he tries blocking it with his bare fucking hands.   
  
Garrovik reports to the bridge that “the creature’s in my quarters, and it has Mr. Spock.” Scotty reverses the air pressure in the room, sucking the creature back out of the vent. As Garrovik guilt-trips himself about Spock’s death, Spock reappears; he, of course, is fine, because his blood’s copper-based. Scotty reports that the creature is leaving the ship. Kirk has a heart-to-heart with Garrovik in which he walks Garrovik through the realization that his hesitation on the planet surface had no bearing on the outcome. Kirk puts him back on duty. Kirk believes that the creature has communicated to him that it is going home—which means back to the scene of the destruction of the Farragut 11 years earlier. So they head there, where he plans to set up an antimatter bomb baited with a jar of human blood. Like idiots, they leave the bait about 50 yards away while they set up the bomb, thus allowing Cloudy Dick to fleece the trap. So now they have a trap and no bait…except for what’s in their own veins. Kirk and Garrovik slug it out over who gets to die nobly. In the end, both are waiting by the bomb for Cloudy Dick. Kirk tells the Enterprise to ‘energize and detonate.’ Bomb goes off.   
  
It takes a while, and Spock has to do some rejiggering, but they do eventually manage to beam both guys up. To Scotty’s “thank heavens,” Spock replies rather priggishly that there was “no deity involved.” McCoy says, “Well, thank pitchforks and pointy ears then.” Kirk tells Garrovik he wants to hang out and tell him stories about his dead father. Garrovik says he would like that. **END SUMMARY**

  
I don’t have strong feelings about this one one way or the other. The plot, of course, is ripped off from _Moby Dick_ , though there is the added element of uncertainty as to whether Kirk’s White Whale a) exists or b) is alive. The thing certainly furnishes evidence of its existence, but the possibility that Kirk is attributing agency to something which may just be the mist rolling off the poison bog is what really seems to get to Spock and McCoy. Once Spock is convinced that Cloudy Dick is sentient—which happens during the battle with the Enterprise—he’s totally on board with pursuing it, partly because he believes (projecting, maybe?) that it is returning home to spawn. McCoy’s the only one who raises what I would consider to be the most important question about Kirk’s behavior: suppose everything he believes about the creature is true, is this “monster hunt” really worth the cost?  
  
Seriously. It’s a big galaxy. There are creatures all over it who are probably inimical to human life. Knowing that Cloudy Dick is as deadly as it is, you’d think the prudent course of action, once Kirk smells that honey, would be to beam everyone the fuck back to the Enterprise and conduct a scanner search from there. Even supposing you can justify sending Rizzo and the other redshirts out there just to make sure it’s there, what in the world justifies going _back down_ to the planet after it? Leave the thing down there, tell Starfleet to mark that system with a big ol’ Here Be Dragons, and leave it alone. True, they have just found a huge  & rich deposit of some totally awesome mineral that’s 100 times harder than diamonds; but oddly enough this is never brought up as a rationale for eliminating the creature. It’s enough for Kirk that the thing took out half a starship—half of HIS starship—and it’s enough for Spock that it’s dangerous. It’s particularly odd to me that Spock never suggests that it might be better to study the creature, or that there may not be a particularly strong ethical justification for destroying a sentient life form which morally speaking may be no different from any other predator.   
  
But of course I don’t write seafaring adventure stories, do I, and I don’t have a proper appreciation of the qualities of boldness, audacity, daring, etc. But at least I am joined in this by McCoy, who as the one stuck doing the autopsies is better placed to appreciate the stunning cost in redshirt life exacted by Kirk’s quest. Kirk does spend some time in his quarters wondering to his personal log whether he’s doing the right thing, and a lot gets hung on this idea that “intuition” is a “command prerogative.” It is interesting that Kirk does in fact seem to be able to communicate with the creature, or at least to ‘read’ it. I guess it kind of makes me sad that instead of going the way a Gene L. Coon episode would, and allowing Kirk to use this intuition to work out a way for them to share the universe with Cloudy Dick, Wallace pushes the episode toward a much more common but less Star Trekly conclusion.  
  
It’s too bad they couldn’t do better planning as far as the schedule went; putting two episodes in which Kirk’s competence is questioned back to back probably made the viewers wonder what it is that Starfleet sees in this guy. But of course the best thing about a crazycakes Kirk episode is watching McCoy and Spock work together to try to get him under control. There’s some very nice writing for the two of them; when Spock tells McCoy that he needs his advice, McCoy responds with, “And I need a drink.” Nimoy plays it as if he is, for once, actually unsure about his own assessment of the situation and sincerely wants McCoy’s help in figuring out just how crazycakes Kirk is by human standards.You realize it must be difficult for Spock to tell the difference between ordinary human irrationality and actual madness. The scene in which McCoy opens up a can of medical-log-entry on Kirk’s ass is also well done. McCoy starts out giving Kirk hell just purely personally, Bones-to-Jim style; when Kirk tries to set a limit on their “friendship,” McCoy is all of a sudden all business, and brings in Spock as a “witness of command grade” for the procedure he’s about to initiate. Kirk responds by asking them whether they’re starting to wonder if he’s too crazycakes for command. Spock compliments Kirk on remembering the formula given in the manual, and replies with the appropriate formula; Kirk lets him get about ¾ of the way through it and then finally shouts, “Blast the manual, ask me your questions.” It is also nice that despite his crazycakes blustering on the bridge with the junior officers, Kirk retains enough self-awareness to realize that his two best friends wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t have legitimate concerns, and that they deserve something more than more haranguing.   
  
As for the conclusion…since Spock tells Kirk that the creature’s immunity to phaser fire is due to its ability to “be elsewhere” when fired upon, it’s not clear to me why blowing up half a planet with antimatter would be any more effective. But then what do I know about antimatter.  
  
All in all, it was a nice episode; not great, but no worse than, say, “Friday’s Child.”   
Up next: Jack the Ripper!


	42. WOLF IN THE FOLD

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For this one, I integrated analysis and summary because the plot...it is just a marvel of WTF. Another classic episode that nevertheless makes you wonder what the heck they were all smoking. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson (ACD) make a brief cameo in the discussion of the mystery plot.
> 
> This episode is often short-listed for the Most Sexist Trek Episode Ever award. Yeah, it's not pretty; but I'm not sure it counts as the worst ever. It's up against some pretty stiff competition.

**STARDATE: January 26, 2012**

**WOLF IN THE FOLD**

**Written by Robert Bloch**

  
What a cornucopia of crazy.

  
You know what, I’m not breaking this one out into summary and analysis. This plot demands commentary at every turn. I say commentary rather than critique because I feel about this one the way Bruno Tonioli felt about Marie Osmond’s “dance of the windup doll” number on _Dancing With the Stars:_ “Eet defies creeteeceesm!”  
  
We open with a closeup of a bellydancer, whose performance seems to go on for quite some time. Of course this is totally necessary for the narrative, in order to establish the setting, which is the tent of a prince of Arabia in which he disports himself with his harem…oh, no, wait, sorry, this is a night club on Argelius 4. Argelius is a “completely hedonistic society,” which explains why they practice the ancient Earth art of belly-dancing. Well, you know, I’m not knocking the belly-dancer; the fact that she’s draped in red plastic streamers is a little distracting, but she’s certainly a better dancer than Vila was as the “green Orion slave woman” in “The Menagerie.” Scotty sure thinks so, judging by the shit-eating grin with which he ogles her. Yes, Scotty is sitting in the back with McCoy and Kirk watching this performance. “Do you like her, Scotty?” murmurs Kirk. “Aye,” says Scott. “Then I shall buy her for you,” Kirk whispers back.

  
No. No, sorry, he doesn’t say that; but he does invite Kara, the dancer, over to the table. Within seconds Scotty has talked her into going for a walk in the fog with him. Since they clearly hired a dancer rather than an actress for this role, that’s just as well, and it’s the sort of thing that typically happens on Argelius, where apparently all women are available for the sexual pleasure of total strangers. And Scotty’s performance of cranium-melting lust is so corny it’s almost sweet in a way, so you almost don’t mind—except that as soon as they’re gone McCoy and Kirk start talking about why they’re on Argelius in the first place.   
It turns out that Scotty is recovering from a work accident which threw him against a bulkhead and gave him a severe concussion. What’s that got to do with bellydancers and the fog? Well, you see, the explosion was caused by a woman. Therefore, naturally, Scotty developed an intense resentment of all women. And the plan is to take him to Argelius and get him laid, thus getting him over his resentment of women and presumably allowing him to work with them again.

  
You know, so many problems the Enterprise runs into could be avoided if everyone would just talk to Spock for 30 seconds before making a decision. Like this:

McCOY: Hey, Spock, I have a plan to get Scotty over his resentment toward women.

SPOCK: Indeed, doctor.

MCCOY: We take him down to Argelius so he can have sex with one!

SPOCK: My review of your Earth literature, Doctor, indicates to me that if your goal is to persuade Mr. Scott to perceive women as individual human beings who ought to be accorded the same respect as men, encouraging him to treat them as sexual objects is a poor strategy. In fact, a brief survey of your sensational crime literature suggests that adding a sexual obsession with women to Mr. Scott’s generalized resentment of them would be the most expeditious way to transform him into a serial killer. MCCOY: Blast your pointy ears, Spock, you’re totally right. Do you have another plan? SPOCK: I would suggest that someone with authority explain to Mr. Scott that it is illogical to hold an entire gender responsible for the actions of one woman. Mr. Scott must be made to understand that his resentment of all women following this unfortunate explosion is no more logical than it would be to develop a resentment toward all men as a result of the Captain’s constant demands for him to perform impossible tasks.

MCCOY: Damn you and your logic, Spock! Why must you always make so much SENSE?!

But nobody ever does ask Spock; and so they’re down on Argelius 4, and McCoy and Kirk believe that Scotty is well on his way to having his “therapeutic” sex. Kirk suggests that he and McCoy repair to another joint he knows “where the women…” We are left to imagine for ourselves what these women are like, as McCoy is so hot to get there that they rush off before Kirk finishes the sentence. As they make their way through the fog, they hear a scream. They soon find the dead body of Kara (actually the dry ice is frothing about so much it could be a mannequin wrapped in pink Easter grass for all we know, but anyway) and, standing up against a wall and holding a bloody knife, a crazed and groaning Scott.

  
Since we are living in a fantasy world where the Federation actually allows its military to be prosecuted for crimes they commit on other planets, Scotty now becomes the subject of a murder investiagation overseen by a weaselly little bald guy named Hengist. Hengist himself is not Argelian; he’s from Rigel 4. Evidently the Argelians hire their administrators from elsewhere, being to hedonistic to run anything themselves. (One does wonder how shit gets made in this culture, and who grows the food. Perhaps they survive purely on sex tourism, importing all of their daily necessities from other planets.) Scotty does not remember what happened during the murder. Kirk says that there is such a thing as a “psychotricorder” which can download Scott’s memories from the past 24 hours, even the ones he’s repressed.

  
At this point [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizaetal**](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/) said, “No way.” When she realized Kirk actually meant it, she said, “That doesn't exist,” and then, “Does that thing show up in ANY other episode?” To my knowledge, it does not. And of course it IS freaking impossible. How is a freaking tricorder supposed to record memories that Scott doesn’t even have? If that corner had a surveillance camera and they used the tricorder to download the footage, that’d make some sense. But this “psychotricorder” thing is just Making Shit Up Cause We Want To. And the pisser is that after asking us to buy the existence of this crazy thing, _they never actually use it._ Its only purpose appears to be...but I am getting ahead of myself.

Prefect Jaris and his wife Sybo arrive. Jaris is the leader of Argelius 4; his wife is a “sensitive” and has been trained in the old Argelian technique of “empathic contact,” which they have used in the past (before the Great Awakening taught them that as long as everyone has sex all the time there’s no crime) to determine guilt. Kirk agrees to let them use this technique—there are political and military reasons why they have to keep on the Argelians’ good side—as long as they can do the regressive memory scan on Scott first. This has to be done in privacy, we learn. 

Well, as soon as they beam down the psychotricorder and a “technician,” and you see that the “technician” is Hot Lieutenant Millennium Edition, you don’t have to be Luke Skywalker to have a bad feeling about this. But off Scotty blithely goes to the private room with Hot Lieutenant, while Hengist heads off to round up the usual suspects.

So just as Kirk and Jaris have noticed that the murder weapon is missing, there’s a scream. Sure enough, Scotty is found dazed next to the body of Hot Lieutenant, who’s been stabbed a dozen times just like Kara was. And of course by the time they bring him around up in Jaris’s living room, Scotty has no memory of what happened.

They bring in Kara’s fiancé, who is chewed out by Jaris for having felt the taboo emotion of jealousy towards Kara, and her father, both of whom were at the club and left right before the murder. Then Sybo comes in from her meditation and they have their séance. Naturally this has to be done in a darkened room around a flame which burns lower and lower as Sybo starts going on about the presence she feels, which is evil, and feeds on fear, and hates life, and hates women, and has a name, which might be Rejjack, Kesla, or something else I’ve forgotten. And then the light goes out, and there’s a scream, and by the time Jaris puts the lights back on Scotty is holding Sybo, who falls over dead, revealing a knife sticking out of her back. 

Scotty insists he didn’t kill her. Everyone goes up to the Enterprise—over Hengist’s objections—and Scotty is examined using their infallible polygraph, which is that same plate that lights up that they used when Kirk testified in “Court Martial,” though in “Court Martial” nobody seemed to be treating it like an infallible polygraph. In the future, I guess polygraphs will be infallible unless they aren’t. Scotty also says that when he went to help Sybo after she screamed, there was “something in the way.” This sets Kirk off on a different track: perhaps the killer is an incorporeal being. 

Spock likes this theory, and together they work the computer until it gives it up that Rejjack, or Red Jack, was another term for Jack the Ripper, famous murderer of London prostitutes back in the 19th century. With the computer’s help, they formulate the theory that Red Jack is an immortal incorporeal being who traveled from Earth through space, following the expansion of Earth colonization, until it finally wound up on Argelius 4. It preys on women, Spock explains, because if as Sybo says it “feeds on fear,” then of course women make better prey since they are “more easily and more deeply terrified” than men are. Hey, fuck you, Spock—if you had to make your living by having sex with total strangers, any one of whom is capable of strangling you, in the dark night in foggy old London Town, you’d be easily and deeply terrified too.   
All right. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, honey badger. I forgot you’re being written right now by the same guy who wrote “Catspaw.” 

Anyway. When the computer informs them that there was a string of unsolved woman-stabbings on Rigel 4 a year ago, all eyes turn to Hengist. Hengist tries to make a break for it. Kirk punches him. McCoy reports that he is dead. Kirk is surprised. They then start hearing maniacal laughter over the PA system. Red Jack has left Hengist’s body—evidently it was all that was keeping Hengist alive; perhaps we are to assume that Red Jack has had the same corporeal form ever since the Victorian age—and taken over the ship’s computer system. (One symptom of this is that the viewscreens will only show a really gnarly screensaver that looks like the inside of a leech’s intestines.) Kirk decides that step one is to deprive Red Jack of sustenance, so he orders McCoy to sedate the entire crew.   
Actually, what happens is this:

**KIRK: How’s the sedative situation?**

**MCCOY: I’ve got stuff in there that would tranquilize an active volcano.**

And he says it with such zest, too. It’s amazing, to my 21st century eyes, to see how gleefully McCoy just dopes everyone to the gills, and what fun they all seem to be having trying to operate a starship while high as the space kites of Zonko 5. Someone must have really liked how Takei played stoned back in “This Side of Paradise,” because Sulu’s the one who has to deliver the most dopey dialogue; Uhura is for some reason not in this episode, so we don’t get to relive her happy spores performance. One wonders why the Enterprise went to space with such an enormous stash of immensely potent tranquilizers, and how often McCoy nips into the supply cabinet after a long night of autopsying dead redshirts.

  
While that’s going on, Kirk and Spock force the computer to try to compute the exact value of pi, thus paralyzing it to the point where Red Jack can no longer manipulate it. Down in the hearing room, McCoy’s tranquilized everyone but himself and Jaris. After McCoy shoots himself up, Kirk tries Jaris; but Red Jack’s in Jaris now. Spock nerve-pinches him before he can do any harm. Red Jack animates Hengist’s body; but Kirk sedates it, so while Hengist is laughing in a stoned way about killing everyone, Kirk and Spock drag Hengist’s body out to the transporter and beam it into deep space, dispersing it as broadly as possible. That taken care of, the next problem is what to do while the “happiest crew in space,” as Kirk puts it, waits for the sedative to wear off. Spock suggests that since nothing’s going to get done for the next few hours anyway, maybe Kirk should go enjoy himself on Argelius. Kirk thinks this is a great idea. He wants to go back to the club he knows of where the women…well, he can’t take McCoy or Scotty, they’re fried. Spock just raises an eyebrow. “Alone?” Kirk says, wistfully. Finally he decides against it, and they all leave the transporter room. The End. 

Pity poor James Doohan. Just imagine. He’s finally told someone’s written an episode just for him. He makes a week’s worth of special appointments with his acting coach. He works out. He shows up for the first day of shooting. And he’s handed the script.

## NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

I’ll say this: it’s memorable. It’s entertaining, even. But really—what a lunatic plot, and so chock-full of gratuitously horrendous gender politics. Take Scotty’s explosion-induced resentment of women, for instance. The only way you could justify this bit of pseudopsychology would be as a way of making Scotty more credible as someone who might actually stab a woman 12 times. And maybe that was Bloch’s idea; but it’s completely foiled by the rest of the episode. First of all, at no time does Doohan ever give you the impression that Scotty resents women, or that he ever resented them. In fact, he’s always played Scotty with such quaint Sir-Walter-Scott-esque chivalry that it’s very difficult to believe that even a serious head injury could implant such a resentment in him; and Scotty’s no different in this episode. He’s the same guy, just more confused and pained. 

Everyone keeps talking about how out of character all this is for Scotty; and that’s the whole problem. Never for an instant is it believable that he might actually have done any of this. With Kirk, there’d be a whisper of a shadow of a doubt—at least for those of us who remember Janice Rand. Even McCoy, that well-known “sensualist,” do we really know what goes on behind the twinkle in that roguish eye? Spock, of course, is out of the question unless he’s just eaten some kind of special Vulcan catnip. But there is just a fundamental mismatch between this plot and the character on which it is hung; and that’s because, at least as far as I’m concerned, Scott was chosen for this not because of who he is but because of his structural position in the show. You can’t put Kirk in this position because he has to lead the investigation. You can’t put McCoy in it because he’s in charge of the sedatives. And honey badger? Please. Talk to the eyebrow. So among the senior officers, who’s left? Scotty. So that’s why he’s stuck in this role; and that’s why this episode is completely useless for him as far as character development goes. 

If Bloch had been willing to move further down the hierarchy he might have picked Sulu for this—that at least might have made it more interesting. Or Uhura…but you know nobody was going THERE in 1968. Let Uhura get in touch with HER resentment of all mankind and LOOK THE FUCK OUT. 

As for the murder investigation…sigh. Any time they try to do a murder mystery plot they fuck it up. I mean imagine Sherlock Holmes trying to work with this:

“The most curious thing about this case, Watson, is that although the first two victims were stabbed multiple times, each screamed only once. What has become of the other screams? We must infer either that the killer gagged them or rendered them unconscious for the initial wounds, then deliberately revived them for the final blow—surely an unpromising hypothesis—or that the knife was laced with some type of poison which acted upon the victim instantaneously, thus killing her before the second blow could be struck. And then, too, how is it that Mr. Scott could have no memory of the first two killings, and yet have a perfect recollection of his actions during the third? If the supposed incorporeal force does in fact have a “hypnotic screen” that wipes it from the memories of its witnesses, how is it that it did not function during Mrs. Jaris’s murder? And if it does not, what explains Mr. Scott’s memory lapses during the first two murders? Surely Scott must be lying, either about what he remembers or about what he does not remember. Who is he protecting? His captain, perhaps?”

“But Holmes, we are in a universe that makes no fucking sense.”

“That is unfortunate, Watson. Ah well. Come, I have heard there are some remarkable new prescription drugs for me to abuse.”

The best part of the episode, really, is the end—or shall I say most of the end. Once Scotty mentions the thing that was in his way, and Kirk and Spock start formulating their theory, one finally feels like something real is happening. The computer coughs up a number of interesting precedents for this hypothetical creature, including the cloud creatures of Mellitus whatever. “I’ve seen the Mellitus creature,” Kirk says. And just as you’re thinking, oh wow, continuity two episodes in a row, you find out it’s some completely different cloud creature which is solid only when at rest. Anyhow, the computer says there’s other beings out there who feed off emotions, so why shouldn’t there be one that feeds off fear. And again, I guess this is one of the things that hooks me about the show: watching people groove on the fact that the universe is big and there’s a lot of weird stuff in it. Kirk’s handling of Red Jack’s reign of terror is legitimately impressive. And of course, how could I give up that final exchange in which Kirk makes a pathetic plea for his honey badger to come girl-watching with him—and is DENIED! Honey badger don’t care—or is it that honey badger does NOT care to watch his beloved captain drool over other people? It fascinates me that the entire point of such a jaunt is apparently to enjoy it with your male best buds. And they say that Eve Sedgwick was making this triangulation shit up!  
  
Well. Season Two must have been full of surprises for its original viewers, cause what’s up next is “The Trouble With Tribbles.”


	43. THE TROUBLE WITH TRIBBLES

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It needs no introduction.

STARDATE: February 9, 2012

THE TROUBLE WITH TRIBBLES  
Written by David Gerrold  
  
There is so much hype about this episode that I don’t even know how to introduce it. Like…should I genuflect? Should I pour a libation to the Great Tribble? Should I invoke the muses?   
  
**The Summary:** Gerrold at last finds a productive use for Chekov by getting him to sling some exposition under the guise of being ‘trained’ by Kirk during a briefing with Spock. We are told that the Enterprise is approaching the K7 space station, which shares a quadrant with Sherman’s Planet, which is claimed by both the Klingons and the Federation; that the Federation has “the better claim” because they saw it first; that “under the terms of the Organian peace treaty” (hooray, a callback to “Errand of Mercy;” Coon produced so he’s probably responsible for this bit of continuity) rights to the planet will go to whoever can develop it “most efficiently;” and that in the future, Stalinist history will make a dramatic comeback in the land of its death and all young Russians will believe that everything good and useful in the world was inwented by Russians.  
  
A Priority One distress call cuts this amusing banter short. Kirk gains the bridge all in a sweat over the idea of the Klingons attacking the space station. Turns out there is no attack. Arriving with Spock in the station manager’s office, Kirk is enraged to learn that Nilz Baris, asshole administrator extraordinaire, and his helpful assistant Arne Darvin have called him out there to tell him to use his entire security staff to guard some storage compartments containing a grain known as quadrotritichaly which is the only grain that grows on Sherman’s Planet. At the urging of Spock Kirk authorizes a measly 2 security guards for this purpose. (Nobody thinks to defuse this Kirk/Baris tension by pointing out that it doesn’t matter how many guards Kirk uses since every last one of them is terminally incompetent.) Kirk also authorizes shore leave.  
  
Uhura and Chekov walk into a bar…there’s a joke here somewhere but I can’t be bothered to find it. Anyway, they find intergalactic space trader Cyrano Jones trying to sell the bartender a tribble. Uhura is instantly taken with it and Jones presents it to her as a free sample, hoping thereby to drum up interest. Kirk and Spock return to the ship, where Kirk is chewed out by Starfleet Command for pissing off Baris and told that he is essentially Baris’s bitch for the time being. A Klingon ship swings into view; but it turns out that all captain Koloth wants for his men is shore leave. At least that’s what he says; and that’s what a smilin’ Kirk pretends he believes. Aboard the Enterprise, Kirk instructs the departing shore leavers not to get into it with the Klingons. He talks Scotty into taking shore leave. This turns out to have been a bad idea. When Koloth’s #2 guy, Korax, baits the Federation guys—irritated perhaps by his encounter with some tribbles, who seem to have an instinctive hatred of Klingons—Scotty’s the one who winds up throwing the first punch. A full-scale comedy donnybrook ensues; Kirk eventually determines that Scotty started it, and is very hurt to discover that Scotty was moved to violence not by Korax’s trash talk about Kirk, but by Korax’s comments regarding the Enterprise.   
  
Meanwhile, of course, the tribbles are breeding like rabbits both on the station and on the Enterprise. When they get into the food processors Kirk finally loses it. Scotty explains they got in through the air vents; this clues Kirk in to the possibility that the tribbles might have gotten to the grain. He and Spock head down there; Kirk finally opens the overhead bin, only to be buried by an avalanche of tribbles. When Spock and McCoy discover that these tribbles are dead and dying, Kirk decides to get to the bottom of this: “Who put the tribbles in the quadrotritichaly, and what was in the grain that killed them?”  
  
Through artful stage management Gerrold contrives to get Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Cyrano Jones, a load of tribbles, Koloth, Korax, and Baris and Darvin all into Lurry’s office. As Darvin passes the tribbles, they freak out. Cyrano remembers that they reacted the same way to the Klingons at the bar. After a quick scan, McCoy announces that Darvin is really a Klingon, thus proving that he knows more about Klingon physiology than he does about Vulcan physiology. Darvin breaks down and confesses: he poisoned the grain, but he had nothing to do with the tribble infestation. Kirk tells Koloth to get him and his Klingon buddies the fuck off the station. After sentencing Cyrano Jones to removing all the tribbles from the station—a task Spock estimates will take him 17.9 years--Kirk and his crew head back to the ship.  
  
The bridge is now tribble-free! Kirk wonders why. After some hemming and hawing and ducking of responsibility, Scotty gives it up that they have beamed all the tribbles into the Klingon ship’s engine room, where…WAIT FOR IT!...”they’ll be no tribble at all.” General laughter! **The end.**  
  
What is there to be said about this intensely beloved and unarguably classic episode? Oh, you know me, I’ll find SOMETHING.  
  
I will begin by discussing its many beauties. This is probably the only truly successful comic episode TOS ever produced. I have a soft spot for “A Piece of the Action” like everyone else; but TWT is better. First of all, this is truly an ensemble piece. (Mostly. Sadly, George Takei picked the wrong fucking day to go shoot some other movie.) What Uhura is given to do in no way alters the show’s gender politics—she’s on shore leave because she wants to “shop,” she’s the Pandora who opens the frickin’ tribble box because like all dames she’s enraptured by anything cute and fuzzy, she’s accused of “opening a nursery”—but she is at least central to the plot and that means she gets more time. Plus I will never forget the way she looks up at Cyrano Jones with those big eyes and that so clearly deliberately adopted kittenish look and says, “Oh, I couldn’t…could I?”   
  
She also sort of gets to bitch to Kirk about her no doubt continually rage-honing job:  
  
 **KIRK: I see you didn’t waste any time taking your shore leave.**  
 **UHURA: And how often do I get shore leave?**  
  
Though Chekov is still annoying, at least he gets to burn Kirk by knowing all about quadrotritichaly, that famous Russian inwention. As for Scotty, Gerrold does a better job of developing his character in Scotty’s ten minutes’ worth of this episode than Bloch did in an hour of “Wolf in the Fold.” It’s not that Scotty is made richly complex, but that the one thing Gerrold establishes for him—his genuine love for the ship to the exclusion of all else—is gradually built up so that by the time Konax shifts from trashing Kirk to trashing the Enterprise, you know that punch is coming long before Scotty stands up. Which of course means you get to savor it all for much longer, especially the moment when Scotty says, perfectly calmly, “Laddie…don’t ye think ye’d better rephrase that?” Though Kirk’s confrontation with Scotty goes on for too long and the joke is belabored too much, it’s still priceless to watch Scotty earnestly explaining to Kirk that he doesn’t have nearly as much invested in Kirk as he does in the ship. The fact that Kirk forces Scotty to repeat the Klingon’s insults to his face—“on the record,” as is established—just makes it better.  
  
McCoy frankly doesn’t come out of it too well. He announces—as if it is a medical breakthrough—that the tribbles will stop breeding if you stop feeding them. Dude, doesn’t EVERY ORGANISM IN THE UNIVERSE stop breeding if you stop feeding it? He does get to deliver the immortal line about tribbles being “born pregnant.” Gerrold’s writing for Spock is more interesting. There is the obligatory joke about Spock pretending to be “immune” to the tribbles’ “tranquilizing effect on the human nervous system” as he lovingly strokes one; but in his faceoff with McCoy over them he complains that like “the lilies of the field” they “neither toil nor spin.” Spock’s concern over the fact that tribbles consume but don’t produce is in keeping with the Klingons’ disgust for them as “parasites,” which is interesting; so is the fact that he’s evidently got the King James Bible in his head. Joseph Pevney, who directed this and many other masterpieces including “Amok Time,” does a good job maintaining all the nonverbal cues that enrich Spock’s relationships with both McCoy and Kirk. In the scenes with Baris and Darvin, Spock and Kirk run a kind of understated but (to the initiated viewer) highly entertaining double act in which Spock pretends to be the straight man but is actually snarking it up just as much as Kirk is. His contempt for Baris is more politely expressed, but it is no less in evidence; after Darvin repeats his accusation that Cyrano Jones is a Klingon spy, Kirk snaps, “I heard you;” Spock adds, with Jeeves-like deference, “He simply could not believe his ears.” Spock’s estimate of the number of tribbles actually contained in those storage compartments, and his explanation of how he reached it, is another golden moment—thrown into relief by the fact that a short time later he has to utter the words, “This tribble is dead.”  
  
But of course what really makes this episode is the way it treats Kirk. He is put into the position in which we typically find Edmund Blackadder: a man with delusions of grandeur who is constantly frustrated by the unreasonable and conflicting demands of powerful people who are either idiots or insane. At the same time he is undermined from below as productivity plummets while his subordinates become mesmerized by this ridiculous but dangerously addictive new toy. We can enjoy this predicament because it takes Kirk down a few pegs; but we can also enjoy it because we have all been there. Oh yes, we’ve been there. Don’t tell me you’ve never worked for Nilz Baris. Everyone who is ever employed will work for Nilz Baris at some point in their lives, and if you were never employed you have certainly had him as a teacher. And don’t tell me you’ve never watched aghast as the organization you’re part of makes a decision so monumentally careless, so inconceivably shortsighted, that it buries you in a ton of totally forseeable tribbles.  
  
It is not necessary to observe, I am sure, that Kirk buried under the falling tribbles is one of the iconic images from this show—for many reasons. The tribble has a wonderfully deflating quality, much like its close cousin the hamster. I can’t remember who started this game, but you can amuse yourself and your friends for hours on end by taking one of TOS’s pretentious titles and substituting “hamster” for one of the words. “The Hamster on the Edge of Forever.” “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Hamster.” “Let This Be Your Last Hamster.” See? The word “tribble” works even better, especially with the visual. TWT is greatly enhanced by a talent that Shatner would hone to perfection in later life: appearing to enjoy making fun of himself, or perhaps helping other people make fun of him. Kirk always seems to be—at least with about 5% of his brain—appreciating the humor of the situation even as he stoically tries to maintain his dignity. So one cannot help feeling some affection for Kirk even as he stands there chest-deep in furry globules, asserting his authority as tribbles bounce squeaking off his head; and it’s that combination of mockery and affection that gives this episode its—dare I say, its warm fuzzy feeling.  
  
Though I cannot substantiate this, my gut tells me that this scene was also tremendously important in terms of getting the performances that they got out of the actors. It must have been so liberating to everyone who had been stomped on by Shatner’s egotism to see him thus tribbled; and his willingness to be a good sport about it, at least on camera, probably made them hate him less. Better company feeling, better show. But on we go.  
  
It’s extra delicious, of course, that Kirk gets to be constantly insulted; but the episode also protects him and our investment in him by giving him a chance to rhetorically mop the floor with Baris. Their exchanges are some of my strongest memories of this show, and they are still capable of giving delight; I particularly enjoy this one:  
  
 **BARIS: You’re taking this project far too lightly!**  
 **KIRK: On the contrary, I take this project very seriously. It is you I take lightly.**  
  
The scene in which Kirk extracts a confession from Darvin by thrusting angry tribbles into his face is still funny; but in a kind of dark way now. It’s funny, of course, because Klingons are scared of something so harmless; torturing with tribbles is like poking with the soft cushions. Still, it’s undeniably chauvinistic that the tribbles sense instinctively that Klingons are unlovable; and there is something so maddeningly American about making decisions based on who gets a better response from the brainless ball of fur.  
  
All in all, you know, the Cold War has never been this much fun. Kirk and Koloth interact more like the captains of rival Quidditch teams than like military men; the fact that Koloth is played by William “Squire of Gothos” Campbell makes it seem like they’re childhood nemeses even though Koloth is a new character. The donnybrook in the bar, ridiculous as it is, is probably the best fight choreography since “Amok Time.” If it weren’t for the overuse of ‘comedy’ music, this episode would hardly be crudely ham-handed at all.   
  
So I salute you, “Trouble With Tribbles,” for showing us all what funny can do. I salute you too, David Gerrold…only you should really have quit while you were ahead, and not tried to milk it for two more episodes. But that’s another story, perhaps for another day.


	44. THE GAMESTERS OF TRISKELION

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From Margaret Armen comes the best thing to happen to fanfiction since "Amok Time." And so kinky you can hardly believe they showed it on network television. 
> 
> Seriously, Kirk's thing with Shahna may seem normative at moments but it all happens in the context of pain, whips, straps, and choke collars. The training harnesses appear to have been included purely for the sake of the kink, since they don't have any function except as symbols of bondage. The way Armen treats Kirk, you'd think she was writing slash. Within the space of 50 minutes she manages to get him 1) cuffed to the wall 2) collared 3) hands bound behind his back 4) whipped 5) stripped to the waist 6) into a leather harness 7) flat on his back with a woman about to drive a long pointy object into him--twice. Margaret Armen, ladies and gentlemen, showing all of us how it's done.

**STARDATE: March 13, 2012**

**THE GAMESTERS OF** TRISKELION  
By Margaret Armen  
  
I’m back. Humor me and say you missed me.  
  
Or else just say: 200 Quatloos on the newcomers!  
  
 **The Summary:** In orbit around Gamma II, an uninhabited planet with some sort of automated communication device on it, Kirk, Chekov (oh, George Takei, George Takei, WHY could you not have shown up to work this week?), and Uhura beam down to perform a routine check. Or at least that’s what they think they’re doing. When they take their places on the landing pad, there is a strange BOINNNNNNG! sound, and instead of a dissolve there’s a real sudden cut to the three of them lying on their backs on a triangular dais with a kind of three-armed pinwheel painted on it in yellow. As they’re trying to figure out what’s going on, they are approached by four people in truly unbelievable outfits. The phasers don’t work, so Kirk, Chekov, and Uhura fight these four people hand-to-hand; Kirk’s the only one capable of giving anyone a fight, but finally he winds up on his back with a tinfoil-clad, green-haired woman pointing the business end of a gigantic seam-ripper at his throat. A disembodied voice tells everyone to hold it. A bald guy draped in black from the neck down appears. He’s wearing a collar with two tricolor triangular things on it and he has been rendered pallid by what looks, in the digitally remastered version, like some very poor quality white greasepaint. (Maybe before remastering it wasn’t that grainy. After remastering, it looks like he started sweating through it or something and they just couldn’t be bothered to reapply.) He is Galt, Master Thrall of Triskelion.   
  
Kirk, Chekov, and Uhura are whisked away to some sort of thrall-holding facility where they are chained to the wall and metal collars are affixed to them. Galt explains that they’ve been brought here by the Providers to be trained as thralls. They soon find out what the collars are for: to enforce obedience by shocking them with unbearable pain. Each of our heroes is shown to a cell and assigned a “drill thrall.” Chekov draws Tamoon, a pink-haired woman whose voice is either dubbed by a man or digitally altered to make it sound low, which makes for some cringe-inducing ‘comedy’ in which Tamoon comes on to Chekov, who she for some reason thinks is a “fine specimen,” and Chekov is terrified. (My guess is that the original script planned something more outrageous here and the producers choked; the ‘humor’ seems to assume a bigger and more powerful Tamoon, or at least one less obviously female, than the one they cast.) Uhura draws Lars, whose first action is to attempt to rape her (while Kirk yells from across the hall, “What’s happening to Lieutenant Uhura?” WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK IS HAPPENING?!). Kirk draws Shahna, the aforementioned statuesque green-haired blonde, resplendent in silver mylar short shorts, boots, harness, and a kind of mylar double sling that makes her breasts look oddly like twin pans of Jiffy Pop.  
  
Without any help from Kirk and his yelling, Uhura manages somehow to send a disappointed and grumbling Lars stomping out of the cell muttering, “It is not allowed to refuse selection.” Shahna explains to Kirk that they will be trained and then “vended” to a provider. Kirk, after explaining to Shahna what ‘slavery’ means, puts the moves on her immediately. Before he makes any headway, they are hauled back to the triangular dais for training. A tall, dark-skinned thrall is hauled out by Galt and designated as the “practice target.” Uhura refuses to attack him. Kirk steps in and says that none of them will attack him. Galt zaps their collars, then says OK, Uhura, now you’re practice target. Kirk steps in, says he’s responsible for his people, and demands to see the providers. Galt says no, but hey, you want responsibility, you can have it; and pretty soon Kirk’s got his hands tied behind his back and is desperately trying to roll out of the way of Kloog’s whip as his torso gets more and more denuded. With help from a tip from Shahna, Kirk eventually gets his hands loose enough to strangle Kloog. Provider 1, excited by Kirk’s feistiness, starts the bidding; Kirk et al are finally vended to Provider 1 for 2000 quatloos. Kirk’s objection that they are “free people” sparks another round of betting about whether the “newcomers” will turn out to be untrainable.    
  
Out for a training jog with Shahna, Kirk (his torso now totally denuded apart from the training hariness) tries to pump her for information/ convert her. After Shahna answers one of his questions, her collar starts going apeshit. Kirk tries to help, then drops her and starts yelling at the sky to stop it, leave her alone, punish him instead. When the provider, interested by this “compassion,” finally cuts off the shock, Shahna is so moved by his willingness to take her punishment that she locks lips with him a couple times. Galt shows up and orders them both back to quarters.  
  
Back at the ranch, Kirk kisses Shahna, then punches her in the face and escapes. Chekov and Uhura have dealt with their own guards; he lets them out and they make a break for it. They get as far as the dais before Galt shows up to zap them. The Providers reassure us that they’re not willing to kill off these “most unusual, most stimulating” Earth people yet.   
  
Up on the Enterprise, meanwhile, Spock has been tracking them back to Triskelion all this time. He and McCoy are about to beam down when the Providers step in and shut the ship down. Somehow this means everyone’s on speakerphone, and Kirk explains the situation, taunting the Providers for not “having the courage to show themselves.” The Providers decide to bring Kirk down to their secret lair, where Kirk discovers that the Providers are three brightly colored brains on pedestals underneath a clear plastic bubble. Having “evolved beyond” their humanoid forms, the Providers basically have nothing to use their enormous brains on apart from betting on sports. After the Providers tell him they’ll all “have to be destroyed,” an irate Kirk uses the magic word “wager.” Kirk winds up proposing a bet: he, Chekov, and Uhura will fight it out with 3 thralls. If they win, the Enterprise and its crew are free and so are the thralls. If they lose, the Enterprise crew has to stay on Triskelion forever. The Providers like that deal, except they want it ot be Kirk against 3 thralls. Kirk doesn’t like that, but he’s in no position to bargain; so there he is on the dais fighting Kloog, Lars, an Andorian thrall—and, eventually, a REALLY pissed-off Shahna. Kirk rolls around with her on the ground for a while before getting a knife to her throat; she surrenders. When the collars come off, Kirk explains that he meant it all for the best. Shahna, now doubly besotted, asks to come with him; he says she can’t, but he gives her an exhortation and a goodbye kiss and then he, Chekov, and Uhura beam up. Shahna stares after them, a tear quivering I each eye, promising to “watch the lights in the sky and remember.” **END SUMMARY**

  
It was a surprise to me to find out that this episode had been written by a woman; but on reflection it makes sense of a few unusual things about “Gamesters.” First, there’s the decision to bring Uhura into the main plot. Second, there’s the speech in which Kirk sells Shahna on the idea of love, which lays heavy stress on the ideal of companionate marriage as a partnership between equals who are helping each other out. But most interesting is the way in which Kirk, in defiance of his characterization in many an earlier episode, really seems to be concerned for the women around him. He intervenes to save Uhura from being punished; and although shouting, “Lieutenant, are you all right?” while Lars is assaulting her is not especially helpful, at least it conveys the idea that he actually cares what’s happening to her—something which, as I have noted before, you’d be hard put to infer from the way he normally treats her.   
  
We’ve seen him, of course, fall for many a space babe over the course of his career; but with the possible exception of Edith Keeler I can’t remember any woman other than Shahna for whom he has offered to accept punishment and/or death. Though it is clear that Kirk’s romancing of her is strategic, he is also genuinely and viscerally distressed when the Providers start shocking her, and the speech in which he asks them to punish him instead betrays the kind of emotional urgency you normally only see from him when, say, Spock’s in trouble. Cheesy as it is, the exchange in which Kirk explains kissing to Shahna is, in its own way, a departure from the norms on this show:  
  
 **SHAHNA: And this…is this also…helping?**  
 **KIRK: You could call it that.**  
 **SHAHNA: Please…help me…once again?**  
  
It’s patronizing, of course; but in the context of Kirk’s talk about Earth people “helping each other,” it at least presents sexuality as something that benefits both partners, which makes it more mutual than a lot of what we’ve seen so far. It’s also perhaps significant that after the first kiss, which Kirk seems to initiate, he draws back. Obviously they have to stop so she can deliver the line; but the way he does it, it seems as if he’s realized what he’s doing, realized how vulnerable she is at this moment (her head is drooping when he zooms in), and pulled back to see how she’s taking it. Either way, it’s significant that he doesn’t kiss her again until she asks him to. I think it’s also significant that when Shahna asks him if it’s always this way between people on Earth, Galt pops out of thin air--so Kirk never actually answers the question.  
  
All of which says to me that maybe one of the reasons I like this episode has something to do with the fact that this Kirk combines the hero of male fantasy (I am strong, free, invicibly untameable, I am fucking Spartacus already) and the hero of female fantasy (I love you, I would die for you, I will save you from the other men who are trying to hurt you).   
  
Armen, of course, could not have known they would put Shahna in a tinfoil bikini and give her troll hair. But despite all that, Shahna does come out of this with some dignity. Kirk appears to respect her combat skills—since she does after all nearly kill him a couple of times—and there is a great moment when, after he’s pulled out all the old lines about what a beautiful woman she is, she puts his training harness on the table, shoves it at him, and commands him to put it on.  
  
As for Uhura, I have a hunch—totally unproven, of course—that the script intended her to play a larger role than she actually did. Kirk’s first offer to the pulsing brains is three-on-three; it’s possible that the decision to make it Kirk contra mundi was the result of his egotistical maneuvering, or that Armen wanted to heighten the dramatic tension, etc. But it’s also possible that the producers just didn’t think Nichelle Nichols could pull off the combat scenes. Uhura is quite easily overpowered in the initial sequence and apart from delivering an elbow to Lars’s gut during one of the escape sequences she doesn’t get to do very much fighting on screen. Although, who knows; maybe if Takei had been available instead of Koenig, the combat stuff would have been handled differently and we might have gotten that 3-on-3 after all.    
  
Say what you want about Shatner, it’s pretty clear by now that he’s got a lot more experience with stage combat than the rest of the cast, and he’s a lot better at it. I would like to point out, though, that in the final combat, the Providers’ rules finally explain the graphic on the dais: Kirk has to stay in the yellow areas and the thralls have to stay in the blue. Crossing into the other color is supposed to be penalized with the loss of a weapon. Well, if they’d really been enforcing that rule they’d have had to start amputating Kirk’s limbs, because neither Shatner nor his stunt double is capable of making a single move without stepping out of the yellow area.   
  
While I’m talking about the performances: George Nelson, the director, never did another _Star Trek_ episode. He did all right with the main action, but I did notice a marked lack of attention to reaction. Chekov and Uhura do a lot of sitting and watching without expressing much. Maybe they’re just supposed to be trying not to let Kirk see how much they’re enjoying watching him get flayed. Ego and all, though, I have to give it to Shatner on this one. It takes a special kind of actor to play opposite a bunch of squeezable plastic brains in a bubble. Who knows, maybe the massive ego helps. Maybe to a guy as narcissistic as he seems to have been, there’s no difference between another actor and a wad of plastic.   
  
It’s a shame that all this is embedded in a plot in which the process of liberation is represented in such a patronizing way that one almost cannot keep one’s food down while listening to Kirk’s bullshit. The difference between the imperialist position (articulated by the Providers) and the liberal position (articulated by Kirk) is that the Providers don’t believe the thralls are capable of self-government whereas Kirk… _also_ believes that they are not capable of self-government, but hopes that with enough “training” they someday _will be_. Kirk keeps repeating that humans have found that all the races they encounter are “capable of development,” and he sells this freeing-the-thralls thing to the Providers based on the idea that “training” the thralls to establish a “normal self-governing culture” will be “a much more exciting game than the one you’ve been playing.” He accepts the Providers’ idea that, left to their own devices, the thralls would be unable to take care of themselves; in fact, as he says, they are familiar with the process of “educating and training” subject peoples until they’re mature enough for freedom, having “done the same throughout the galaxy.” He’s not so much making the case for freedom as baiting the Providers into to taking up the white man’s burden. (Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden,” 1899. England passes the imperial torch to the United States. The Google’ll find it for you.) Freedom is treated as if it is the natural property of the more intellectually ‘advanced’ beings which they then bestow upon everyone else.  
  
The script, intentionally or not, actually highlights some of the absurdities embedded in the whole “we will free you by remaining your masters” idea. When Kirk asks Galt what they plan to do with them, Galt says, “You will be trained. What other use is there for thralls?” Once the collars come off at the end of the fight, the first question Kirk asks the Disembodied Voices is, “The thralls will be trained?” Of course they’ll be trained…they’re already being trained. What other use is there for thralls? OK, they’re now being trained to do something other than disembowel each other for someone else’s pleasure…but the Providers are still doing the training, and one assumes the providing, and as we know, if you really want it to, you can extend someone’s “training” for a long damn time. Kirk never explains to Shahna why she can’t come with him; but when she says she wants to travel to the stars too, he tells her that her people aren’t ready for all that yet: “There’s so much you must learn here first…the Providers will teach you. Learn it, Shahna. All your people must learn, before you can reach for the stars.” So, by the time Shahna’s descendants achieve space travel, Kirk will be safely out of harm’s way.  
  
I haven’t talked much about the B plot in which the Enterprise tracks them down. That’s because it’s the same thing over and over: Spock has an idea, it’s clearly the only logical idea in the vicinity, but McCoy and Scotty don’t like it, and they bitch about it until he makes them stop. There is some nice Spock/McCoy writing in it; for instance:  
  
 **McCoy: Hope? I always thought that was a human failing, Mr. Spock.**  
 **SPOCK: True, Doctor. Constant exposure does result in a certain degree of contamination.**  
  
The best part, though, is when Spock finally decides to cut all this bullshit out by telling them that he’s in command so they’re doing what he wants “unless it is your intention to declare a mutiny.” When they reach Triskelion and Spock declares his intention of beaming down alone, McCoy pipes up with, “Well, Mr. Spock, if you’re going into the lion’s den, you’ll need a medical officer.” Spock replies, “Daniel, as I recall, had only his faith; but I welcome your company, doctor.”   
  
Anyway, this one stood up to the rewatch better than I thought it might, tinfoil bikini and all. Up next…fizzbin!


	45. A PIECE OF THE ACTION

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Despite my curmudgeonly problems with the plot, I do cherish this episode, particularly for what it does with the Kirk/Spock team. They look pretty sharp in their new threads and they make a pretty cool coupla cats. And there's Fizzbin.

**STARDATE: March 21, 2012**

**A PIECE OF THE ACTION**  
 **Written by David P. Harmon and Gene L. Coon**  
  
Star Trek goes gangster, back before it was spelled with a terminal ‘a’.  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise approaches a planet inhabited by the “Iotians,” a culture which was contacted a hundred years earlier by a Federation starship called the Horizon. Since the Horizon was operating in the bad old days before the Prime Directive, the Enterprise’s mission is to find out if there was cultural contamination, and if so, correct it. At the invitation of one Bela “Boss” Oxmyx, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down. Has there been cultural contamination? Is the Pope Catholic? Does a bear shit in the woods? Are Vulcans fascinating? Yes, there has been some @#$! cultural contamination. In fact, all of Iotian society is now based on the “teachings” of a book about Chicago gangsters of the 1920s published in 1992 (in the past, historical nonfiction will have been published in the same format now used for funeral home guestbooks and wedding albums). Our three heroes are surprised by machine-gun-toting thugs who take them to Bela’s office, where Bela makes Kirk an offer he can’t refuse: Kirk must bring down a load of “fancy heaters” (i.e., phasers) and helps him take over the entire planet, rubbing out his competition in the process. Or else he will get killed.  
  
Kirk will have none of it; so he, Spock, and McCoy are held captive in a warehouse while Bela contacts the Enterprise to let them know he has “put the bag on their captain.” Scotty, not for the last time, has some difficulty translating the local dialect. You’d think the universal translator would take care of it, but…well, actually, if you start thinking AT ALL about how the whole gangster slang thing would actually function if this were really an alien planet the whole episode just goes up in smoke, unless we are to assume that English has become the universal language of Iotia since their discovery of the Book. All right, anyhow, Kirk distracts the thugs by teaching them a card game called “Fizzbin” until, while attempting to understand the game’s nonsensical rules, they let their attention wander and are jumped. Spock and McCoy head to the radio station to contact Uhura while Kirk grabs a machine gun and runs off to abduct Bela—only to be stopped by thugs from Bela’s rival, Jojo Krako. Spock and McCoy transport up to the Enterprise so Spock can consult the sociological computers for a possible solution to the contamination. Kirk is taken to Krako’s office, which I swear to God is the exact same set as Bela’s office but with different wallpaper and furniture. Krako proposes to Kirk the same deal Bela proposed, only he has his moll give Kirk a shoulder massage while he’s making the pitch. Kirk will have none of it. Krako directs his thugs to “put him on ice.”   
  
Spock and McCoy, meanwhile, hear from Bela that Krako has Kirk, and that Bela wants to negotiate, so rather stupidly they beam back to Bela’s office, where of course they are taken prisoner again.    
  
Kirk, “on ice” in another holding room, manages to rig up a tripwire which allows him to defeat his guards and escape. Heater in hand, he charges back to Bela’s office, liberates Spock and McCoy, and strips down Bela’s two thugs so he and Spock can suit up in gangster duds and go “put the bag on Krako.” Arriving at Krako’s headquarters, a young boy offers them advice about how to hit Krako in exchange for “a piece of the action.” Kirk promises him same; the boy then helps Kirk and Spock get the jump on the two thugs at the door. Sadly, once they get into Krako’s office, more thugs come in behind them. But Kirk, who is burying himself in the part now that he has a costume, decides that he’s in charge, that the Feds are taking over the whole planet, and that they will make Krako the king if he plays ball. He gets a communicator back and calls Scotty, explaining the plan, and subtly giving him Krako’s coordinates so Scotty can beam him up to the ship. This of course distracts the thugs, who get jumped again.   
  
Kirk and Spock then return to Bela’s, where Kirk gets Bela to call up all the other bosses so Scotty can beam them all to the office. Kirk tries to impress them with the necessity of working together, which seems to go all right until Bela questions the existence of the Federation. Kirk finally demonstrates this by having Scotty stun the entire block. Now convinced, the bosses accept Kirk’s proposal: Bela will run the planet, Krako will be his lieutenant, they will “run it like a business,” and the Federation will come back every year to collect their cut, which is 40% of the profits.  
  
Back aboard the Enterprise, McCoy and Spock are, as Kirk puts it, “brooding.” Spock wonders how they’re supposed to explain to Starfleet that a starship has to go out there every year to “collect our ‘cut.’” Kirk says some BS about their putting the cut into the planetary treasury to fund good things. McCoy is troubled by the fact that he left his communicator behind on the planet. Kirk and Spock agree that this is a major problem, since the Iotians are famous for being both clever and imitative. “In a couple years,” says Kirk, “they may be asking for a piece of OUR action!” **The end.**  
  
All right, so, this joins “Mudd’s Women,” “I, Mudd,” and “Trouble with Tribbles” in the comedy category. As a comedy, I have to say, it sure beats both Mudd episodes but does not hold up as well as TWT for me. A lot of the humor is generated by the ‘20s gangster slang. When, in the early part of the episode, the Enterprise officers are comically unable to parse the slang, that is not as funny to me now as it used to be. It’s not until Kirk decides to start speaking their language that this shtick really takes off. Part of the funny is hearing this stuff come out of Kirk’s mouth in a ridiculous gangster snarl; but equally funny is the way Kirk keeps trying to draw Spock into his performance. Initially hopelessly square, “Spocko” gradually learns the argot until he winds up pointing his “heater” at Bela and snarling, “I would advise yous to keep dialing, mister.” Kirk’s facility with the slang is counterpoised with his utter incompetence when faced with a stick shift, something I am now actually much better able to appreciate, and the car shtick provides Spock with some golden lines: “Captain, you make an excellent starship commander…but as a taxi driver, you leave much to be desired.”   
  
As I have said before, there is something irresistible about Kirk when he’s bluffing; and nowhere is that better demonstrated than in the “fizzbin” scene. I do think that could have been made funnier by making the thug just a little bit smarter, so that he could have time to become more frustrated by the fact that the rules clearly don’t make sense (much the way Costello does during the “Who’s On First?” routine). All the same, Kirk making up the rules to fizzbin remains one of the funnier things that ever happened on Star Trek. What makes it genius is how there is not a single rule that doesn’t incorporate exceptions; and the exceptions get crazier and crazier, with the result that you can go up to nearly any TOS fan and say, “If it were dark on Tuesday,” and they know exactly what you’re talking about.  
  
As costume-drama episodes go, this one has a leg up because there is actually an explanation for why an alien planet looks exactly like a Hollywood lot. The cost-saving motive, however, is poorly camouflaged. The white felt hat that Kirk appropriates is so beaten up it has the texture of dryer lint. All the props look kind of shopworn, and Spock’s gangster pants are not long enough.   
  
All right, so, it’s a comedy episode, I know I’m not supposed to take it seriously. Nevertheless. Of all the unsatisfactory band-aid short-term short-sighted solutions that Kirk has pulled out of his ass 50 minutes into an episode, this one is without question the lousiest. All of this misery starts because Kirk is trying to ‘correct’ the Horizon’s ‘contamination.’ This is supposed to be his driving motive all the way through, as he occasionally reminds us by saying things like, “This mess is our responsibility and we’ve got to straighten it out.” All the bagging and jumping and unbagging and whatnot starts because Kirk refuses to give Bela the help he needs to take over the whole planet. So what happens, 50 minutes after Kirk risks death by refusing to help Bela take over the whole planet? Kirk puts Bela in charge of the whole planet. Why? Because, according to Spock, Bela has “the right idea”: the government has to be unified or else it will deteriorate into anarchy. And since Bela already has the biggest territory, apparently it makes sense to make Bela the dictator. Which is essentially what Kirk is doing. Nobody pretends that Iotia will now be a democracy. The best you could hope for with Kirk’s plan is that the bosses work out some sort of amicable power-sharing agreement; but that will do nothing to change life for the ordinary citizen apart from maybe make crossing the street a less risky activity. Plus, this “business” will be for profit—and one assumes the profit will come from the citizens, who will go on paying their “percentages.”   
  
No, it’s a totally unsatisfactory situation. What, the Federation just flies into a wartorn society, picks the most powerful thug, sets him up as dictator, coerces him into turning over 40% of the planet’s resources to them every year, and then flies away before the fallout begins? What the fuck kind of ‘prime directive’ is that?  
  
Ah, I see. It’s not the Prime Directive…it’s American foreign policy.  
  
I would love to know whether this ending is Harmon’s or whether it was created by Coon. Spock’s endorsement of Bela’s plan to unify the planet under One Big Thug struck me as un-Vulcan in the same way that Spock’s endorsement of Kirk’s plans for violent resistance on Organia did in “Errand of Mercy.” Is this ending an ironic critique of the Prime Directive, pointing out the thinness of the progressive veneer that Federation policy spreads over the criminal business of imperialism? Or are we supposed to believe that Kirk is actually solving something by doing this?  
  
I’ll tell you one thing: this episode really highlights the futility of the “we have to stay there will we’ve straightened our own mess out” argument which kept us in Iraq for so long and which is still keeping us in Afghanistan. How in hell does Kirk think he’s going to reverse 100 years of cultural development? Spock’s beloved “sociological computers” give up when asked to solve this problem; and as McCoy points out, they’re not so much going down to reverse the contamination as to “recontaminate them.” The more Kirk tries to fix things, the more chaotic the situation becomes, until finally order has to be restored through the imposition of a dictatorship whose leaders are motivated purely by greed. How will ordinary Iotian citizens fare under this dictatorship and the Federation's annual inspections? Well, I'll tell you this: the one promise Kirk makes to an Iotian citizen--that the boy who helped them out will get "a piece of the action"--is never fulfilled.  
  
Ah well. At least the “imitative” Iotians will, thanks to McCoy’s negligence, have a chance to one day reverse the power relationship. Too bad they never made a followup to this one during TNG or DS9.  
  
Up next: When Floating Amoebas Attack!


	46. THE IMMUNITY SYNDROME

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mostly enh, but there are some very strange things about this one, including what happens with the McCoy/Spock relationship.

**STARDATE: March 23, 2012**

**THE IMMUNITY SYNDROME**  
 **Written by Robert Sabaroff**  
  
Today’s magic word is: ANTIBODIES.  
  
 **The Summary:** Kirk and the Enterprise, after a rough few months, are looking forward to some rest and relaxation on “some lovely…planet” (yes, the pause is to make you think he’s about to say “objectified female body”) when they pick up a very muddled communication from a ship called the Intrepid which is manned by Vulcans. Spock has a Great Pain Moment and announces that the Intrepid and everyone aboard it has just “died.” Kirk and McCoy naturally think this means Spock has gone round the twist and send him to sickbay. However, it is soon confirmed that not only has the Intrepid and its crew been lost but that the solar system they were headed toward is also dead. Kirk receives orders from Starfleet Command to go find out what the hell happened.   
  
Reluctantly, Kirk sails the ship straight toward the source of the destruction, and discovers that there is a giant black “hole in space” which seems to be eating everyone’s energy. The Enterprise boldly goes into it, after which the stars disappear. Drowning in this inky blackness, they are also losing power steadily while, according to McCoy, everyone’s vital signs are slowly dropping. McCoy is shooting everyone up with stimulants to enable them to keep going, but clearly this is a bad situation. They figure out that within the dark zone everything seems to be reversed—by moving forward they move back, etc.—but nothing much else is clear until they discover that at the center of this dark zone is a glowing red amoeba 11,000 miles long.  
  
Literally, McCoy explains it to them by showing them a slide of am amoeba under a microscope. It’s a HUUUUUGE unicellular organism that guzzles up all the energy it encounters. Since the probes they’re sending into it can give them only limited data, someone has the bright idea of sending in a shuttlecraft; Spock insists it would have to be manned. Kirk doesn’t want to send anyone to certain death; McCoy volunteers, citing the awesomeness of the scientific knowledge to be gained. As McCoy and Spock gear up for a pissing contest over who has the best right to sacrifice himself for the good of the many, Kirk says he’ll decide. Kirk hates to do it, but he’s gotta go with honey badger. Kirk apologizes to him for killing him; but honey badger don’t care. McCoy, however, is pissed. Spock heads out in the shuttlecraft and, with many twists and turns and endangerments, manages to relay the coordinates of the chromosomes, which is where they want to hit the thing. He also reports that this thing is about to undergo mitosis. During a conversation with McCoy in which McCoy analogizes the giant amoeba to a virus attacking the galaxy, Kirk notes that if it eventually developed into a multicellular organism, “We would be the virus invading its body.” McCoy muses on how ironic it would be if humanity’s destiny turned out to be being the antibodies in some gigantic space alien’s body. The magic word! Kirk suddenly has a solution! Attack! Attack!   
  
Into the amoeba the Enterprise goes. It travels right to the nucleus and the chromosomes, ignoring the mitochondria and all the other parts of the cell we all learned about in high school biology, plants an antimatter bomb in it, and hightails it out before the timer goes off. On the way out they detect the shuttlecraft, which they tow along, at great risk to themselves. Finally, they are free! And the amoeba is destroyed! And the stars are back! And Spock is alive! And it’s time for rest and relaxation on some lovely…planet. **The End.**  
  
From the trailer I was expecting worse. It’s true that I don’t like the “penetrate the vagina dentata” plot any more now than I did in “Doomsday Machine.” But as a dramatic episode, it’s more or less decent most of the time.

It’s interesting to see them all working at low energy, though it makes everything very gloomy and depressing; and there are moments, like Kirk talking to his captain’s log and wondering “which of my friends do I condemn to death,” that evoke genuine emotion. Having Spock out there in a shuttlecraft which sometimes is and sometimes isn’t in contact with the Enterprise generates good tension, and you wouldn’t want to give up the moment of elation when Spock, having lost contact, communicates his continued existence by making the giant amoeba convulse. Uhura and Scotty get things to do, and even Chekov is mostly not annoying. There is too much lingering over the heroism—we get to see both Spock AND Kirk enter soon-to-be-posthumous logs bequeathing their “commendations” to their also-soon-to-be-dead comrades, though Spock commends the entire crew and Kirk only mentions the officers—but some of it is legitimately moving.  
  
As for the advisability of building an episode around a gigantic amoeba…On the one hand, it is ridiculous in that it reduces the “science” part of “science fiction” to about the eighth grade level. On the other, some of these episodes have almost no “science” component at all, and it’s interesting to see the writer experiment with a model of the galaxy which is biological rather than based on physics. The Zone of Darkness is a lot scarier than the big amoeba, though, which means that the episode moves in the wrong direction: we go from “Oh no, the unknown!” to “Are you fucking kidding me?” instead of the other way around. There’s also no discussion of why something which is unlike anything we’ve ever known in any other way would replicate the cell structure basic to Terran biology. I have to say that the “antibodies” epiphany—and by the way, can I say, I am getting very tired of the Magic Word Maneuver? I’m making a list now:  
  
WHEN KIRK CANNOT FIND A SOLUTION, TRY SAYING THESE WORDS OUT LOUD**:  
  
* Chess  
* Bluff  
* Wager  
* Antibodies  
  
**Or, put him near a bright light he can flick on and off.  
  
Anyway, as I said, I don’t see why Kirk dances around repeating “Antibodies” so gleefully, given that the only insight it gives him is to do what they were already planning to do—blow up the chromosomes—with the only difference being the idea of taking the ship into the thing itself.   
  
I’m not sure how this is related to the antibodies idea, unless it’s that without the word “antibodies” the idea of penetrating this thing in order to destroy it would never have occurred to him. Well, he is exhausted and hopped up on stimulants; maybe it’s impeding his cognitive processes.  
  
All right, so, gigantic amoeba, has its upsides and downsides. So does the other major strand of this plot, which is the McCoy/Spock stuff.  
  
I can see why if, say, you were invested in McCoy, you would hate this episode—because McCoy spends much of this episode being a complete asshole. He questions Spock’s ability to perceive the deaths on the Intrepid, gripes at him about not getting to “share” in the certain death expedition, and then there’s this amazing exchange:  
  
 **SPOCK: Grant me my own kind of dignity.**  
 **MCCOY: Vulcan dignity? How can I grant you what I don’t understand?**  
 **SPOCK: Then use one of your own superstitions. Wish me luck.**  
 **MCCOY: [says nothing; stares stonily]**  
 **SPOCK: [stares stonily, walks into hangar, gets into shuttle, bay doors close]**  
 **MCCOY: [very quietly] Good luck, Spock.**  
  
The thing that makes most of McCoy’s interactions with Spock in this episode feel so weird is that there is no trace of humor on either side. Apart from the ending, in which McCoy responds to Spock’s plea that the Enterprise not risk itself to save him by snapping, “Shut up, Spock, we’re rescuing you!” and doing his “hmph” face, their conflicts are dead serious on both sides. Without the playfulness, their sparring is no longer enjoyable; it’s just painful and very uncomfortable. McCoy seems genuinely angry at being done out of the opportunity to give his life for science, and his refusal to wish Spock luck comes across as petty and shockingly cold. Seeing him do it after Spock’s out of earshot doesn’t really help. Because they seem to have discontinued the “final banter” ending, McCoy doesn’t get a chance to make it right with him. (Spock responds to the “Shut up, we’re rescuing you” with a sneering reference to him as “Captain McCoy.”) Spock, meanwhile, is unusually self-righteous and annoying. He lectures McCoy, apropos of not much, on the “bloodiness” of human history and on the human failure to understand that the death of one is as great a tragedy as the death of many; he gloats to McCoy about winning the Who  Gets to Die contest; after he gets through the cell barrier he remarks to McCoy that “you would not have survived it,” and at one of the many moments at which it looks like he’s a goner, he wastes his dwindling air supply to say, “Tell Dr. McCoy he should have wished me luck.”  
  
Much of this feels out of character to me—especially McCoy’s being so bent out of shape about not getting to go on the suicide mission. In most episodes McCoy is not keen on heroic sacrifice, either for himself or for anyone else. The only time I can remember McCoy deliberately putting himself in danger for the sake of the collective is when he tests the vaccine on himself first in “Miri.” Outside of what one might call Hippocratic heroism—i.e., the risks he has to take in order to do his work as a doctor—there is no evidence that I can recall of the “martyr complex” that Spock accuses McCoy of having. The line about “Vulcan dignity” also makes no sense to me, since if there’s one thing McCoy and the other human jackasses do understand about Vulcans, it’s that they have frickin’ dignity out the wazoo.   
  
As for the way they interact, I think this is perhaps a case of someone writing a Season Two episode using Season One’s bible. This is Robert Sabaroff’s first and only TOS episode; maybe he wasn’t watching. The level of antagonism, and the lack of mutual respect and affection, take us back to the days of “The Galileo Seven,” in which McCoy still seems to need convincing about this Spock character and Spock is hurt and baffled (in a not-expressed Vulcan way) by human prejudice against him. But by this point in the show, the actors have taken that relationship to a much different place. After “Operation: Annihilate,” for instance, in which McCoy is tormented over having “blinded” Spock, and mutters about Spock being “the best first officer in the fleet” within his hearing; or “The Conscience of the King” and “Obsession,” in which they work together to protect Captain Crazycakes; or even “A Piece of the Action,” in which McCoy comments admiringly on Spock’s Vulcan neck pinch technique; or “Amok Time,” in which McCoy is Spock’s fucking second best man already, suddenly playing them as for-real enemies doesn’t make any sense.   
  
I was going to blame this on the director; but the director was Joseph Pevney, who directed “Amok Time,” “City on the Edge,” and many other episodes in which the McCoy/Spock relationship is more nuanced. Maybe he just decided to go somewhere different with this one. It’s true that McCoy’s coldness and, I might even say, cruelty in the moments before Spock flies to his death evoke some interesting reactions from Spock, and suggests that McCoy is more important to Spock emotionally than we might otherwise have guessed. I could maybe get behind that if it weren’t for the fact that so much of the antagonism is motivated by McCoy’s hurt and disappointment at getting turned down for a mission I can’t believe he would really want to go on.  
  
Ah well. Whatever my problems with this episode, I’m sure I will come to look back on it with fondness, because “A Private Little War” is up next…and it looks BAD.


	47. A PRIVATE LITTLE WAR

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The badness of this episode is a real shock to the system. It's not just endearingly cheesy/flawed/technically laughable like other bad episodes ("Catspaw," etc.). It's bad in a way that is almost kind of offensive, because there seems to be a kind of nastiness or malice to it. But judge for yourselves.

**STARDATE: March 26, 2012**

**A PRIVATE LITTLE WAR**  
 **By Gene Roddenberry from a story by Jud Crucis**  
  
At the end of an episode like this, you ask yourself, “Who WROTE this?” And then you look back at the opening credits. And you think, OK, well Gene Roddenberry wrote the teleplay, that explains a few things. Wonder who this Jud Crucis guy is. And then you look up Jud Crucis on IMDB, and you find out it’s a pseudonym for Don Ingalls. And then you think Don Ingalls, hm, that name is familiar…didn’t he write…didn’t he write…noooOOOOooOOOoooo!!!!!  
  
That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. The “story” for this episode came from the same guy who wrote “The Alternative Factor.” And here’s the killer: _of the two episodes for which Don Ingalls was responsible, this is the one he didn’t want associated with his real name._   
  
I’m just telling you this cause, you know, you might not want to sail the ship of your consciousness into a televisual anomaly the like of which modern science has never seen.  
  
I’m not breakin’ this one into summary and analysis. This plot must be savored, drop by rancid drop.  
  
All right, so, we start off with McCoy, Kirk, and Spock down in that same goddamn California park, I’m sorry, the planet “Neural” (see if you add a T, it becomes “neutral,” you get it? Get it?). McCoy is stoked about all the interesting organic compounds he’s discovering in the local flora, all of which will be hugely beneficial to medical science. Kirk is stoked to be back on the planet Neural again. He visited it once as a young captain and found it beautiful, lovely, inhabited by simple and peaceful people with bows and arrows and absolutely perfect in every way except for the “mugato,” the “apelike quadruped” that preys on the humanoid inhabitants. It is, in fact…paradise.  
  
No. No. No, for the love of God, NO MORE EDEN PLOTS! Just because you sort of got lucky with it once in “This Side of Paradise,” that doesn’t mean you keep going back to that slot machine! May I remind you of “The Apple?” The Eden plot brings out all the WORST fucking things about this show—the condescending attitude toward “primitive” cultures, the arrogance with which “humans” (Americans) play God in these cultures like it’s their natural-born right to do it, the ultracheesiness of allegories both religious and political, and the sexism, oh my God, the sexism, it all creates a black hole of awful so powerful you can barely drag your brain to safety. And this is before we get to the fact that for some reason, Gene Roddenberry seems to have believed that in order to convey a character’s state of innocence it was necessary to fit him or her with a gigantic blond nylon wig.   
  
All right. So. There are two ethnic groups on this planet: the “hill people” and the “villagers.” We know the Villagers are up to no good because THEIR gigantic hideous nylon wigs are dark brown. And because they’re carrying flintlock rifles, which didn’t exist on this planet when Kirk first visited. And because they’re about to ambush Kirk’s old buddy Tyree—hill people, blond of course—and some of his men. Kirk spoils the ambush by throwing some rocks at the villagers; the villagers then chase Kirk and Spock. Spock gets shot; Kirk hauls him to where McCoy is and they all beam up. Spock is immediately put on a gurney and worked on by McCoy and a Doctor Mbenga. Kirk is called up to the bridge because there’s a Klingon ship orbiting the planet; but it turns out the Klingons haven’t seen them. While Chekov tries to keep the Enterprise beyond their visual range, Kirk muses out loud about the presence of flintlocks on this planet; this precipitates a conversation with Uhura, Chekov, and Scotty about whether this has to be the result of Klingon interference or not. I mention this because the only damn thing about this episode that is actually good is the fact that Uhura gets to discuss a subject other than hailing frequencies while demonstrating a better knowledge of human history and anthropology than Kirk has. Kirk angrily cuts off this “debate,” then apologizes, citing his worry about Spock.   
  
Kirk visits Spock in sickbay. Dr. Mbenga and McCoy tell him that they’ve done what they can and honey badger has to heal his own badass self with his special fucking Vulcan physiological discipline. McCoy reassures Kirk that Mbenga knows his shit because he “interned during the Vulcan war.” Great, says Kirk. He can cure Spock while you come down to the planet with me to find out whether the Klingons are fucking around with my favorite paradise planet and its good and innocent people. So down they go to the planet—  
  
[record skipping sound effect]  
  
Hold it.  
  
Honey badger is at death’s fucking door, _because Kirk got him shot_. And not only does Kirk want to go back down to the planet and play undercover agent while honey badger maybe dies, but he wants the ship’s top medical officer to come with him.

What the fuck?  
  
Don’t give me this “he’s in good hands with Dr. Mbenga” bullshit. Who is this Dr. Mbenga? What is this “Vulcan war?” When was the last time the Vulcans had a war? Where was this guy when McCoy was trying to do open heart surgery on Sarek without knowing what his resting blood pressure was supposed to be? Where was this guy when McCoy was trying to unwrap evil brain cell tentacles from Spock’s spinal column? Where was this guy—well, I’m not gonna go on, because we all know: He was nowhere. He did not exist. The only reason he exists now is to allow McCoy to come down to the planet with Kirk on this crazy caper while Spock remains out of commission on the Enterprise. We all know we have never seen Dr. Mbenga before and that we will never see him again. So, this episode’s credibility is totally shot and we haven’t even gotten back to the planet yet. That’s not a good sign.  
  
All right. So. In defiance of everything we know about both of their characters, Kirk and McCoy leave the possibly dying Spock unconscious in the hands of Dr. Mbenga and Nurse Chapel and beam down to the planet wearing the local costume, which is of course buckskin hides and—  
  
If I may have a moment here.  
  
Ingalls’s filmography indicates he wrote for a number of TV westerns. Well, that would explain why the “hill people” are vaguely Native American; and to give wardrobe some credit, they have come up with some kind of nice looking buckskin vests and leggings for McCoy, Kirk, and the “hill people,” and of course they have a lovely natural setting to film in. But the fact that the setting, the costumes, and most of the props look natural only makes the horrendous wigs and the stupid forget-me-not shaped forehead doohickey that indicates the inhabitants’ alienness look 1000% cheesier than they would on, say, Triskelion, where _everything_ is synthetic and cheesy.   
  
I resume.  
  
Kirk and McCoy walk their stylin’ buckskin suits down to Tyree’s camp. On the way there, they are attacked by a mugato.  
  
Words fail me here. I do not think this level of ridiculousness can be conveyed without a visual. I mean I can tell you that the mugato suit is blond and furry and that in addition to a hideous pallid apelike mask the mugato sports a single horn on its head and a dorsal ridge of “spines” clearly made of foam…but how can I convey to you the sheer brainshattering badness of it all? It seems unfair that the fact that the mugato costume is technically an improvement over, say, the Gorn’s actually makes it worse; the relative agility of the mugato tempts them into shooting more ‘combat’ which means we see more of Kirk grappling with a big ol’ stuffed animal and pretending it’s gonna kill him. McCoy vaporizes the mugato, but the mugato—whose fangs are apparently poisonous—has already bitten Kirk’s shoulder. Kirk, going into shock, tells McCoy to take him to Tyree’s camp, where we meet Tyree and his wife Nona, who is basically what would happen if Medea mated with Lady Macbeth and then gave the baby to Ke$ha to raise. Resplendent in what may be the worst wig of this episode (if only because it’s so much longer and incorporates both bangs and padawan braids—oh and it is, of course, black, since she’s Pure Evil), a way-too-small red feather vest, and slinky low-riding black bellbottoms which do not seem to be buttoned all the way up, Nona is a “canutu woman,” which means basically that she’s a witch. It’s established that she uses her powers—and the power of some native plant which has the effect of turning men into lust-crazed morons—to manipulate Tyree, and that she’s all for getting some guns and turning the tables on the villagers. After extracting from Tyree the information that Kirk is more than what he seems, she cures him of the mugato bite.  
  
How does she do this when McCoy couldn’t, you ask. Well, let me just say this: it’s kind of like voodoo, and kind of like a mindmeld, and kind of like the dance of the green Orion slave woman, only with a lot more eye-rolling and head-rolling and incoherent mutterings and writhing and blood and at one point they cut back to Tyree and we see that he has suddenly acquired a drum which he’s beating and oh my God maybe it’s just as well they put Julie Newmar into “Friday’s Child” instead.   
  
Well, Kirk is cured. Meanwhile back on the Enterprise Nurse Chapel is holding Spock’s hand and trying to will him back to health when Dr. Mbenga comes in. He explains that Spock is aware of his surroundings, but can’t communicate because he’s devoting all his energies to repairing his own damaged tissues cause Vulcans are so fucking badass that they can do that. He tells Spock that someone will be with him 24/7 from now on, and instructs Chapel that if Spock regains consciousness she should do ‘exactly what he tells you.’   
  
This can bode no good.  
  
Back to the planet. Kirk recovers, is pleased to see his buddy Tyree again, and decides after talking to him that they should do some recon over in the village to find out whether these guns are being made by the locals or coming in from somewhere else. They sneak over at the dead of night, infiltrate the forge, and discover plenty of evidence to indicate that these guns are being made with Klingon technology. (Actually, if you want evidence of contact with a technologically superior culture, you need look no further than the fabric of Nona’s pants; but I digress.) The Klingon, who we know has been plotting with the head villager to advance their weapons technology, enters the forge with his Apella, the head villager; McCoy and Kirk hide, but McCoy’s tricorder peeps and soon the fists of fury are a-flyin’. Kirk, McCoy, and Tyree manage to make it back to camp with one of the guns and some ammo.  
  
And then things REALLY go bad.  
  
Kirk, despite having rebuffed Nona’s demand for superior weapons with a touching explanation about how ever since their own brush with nuclear destruction humans have realized that it’s a crime to introduce advanced weaponry to other planets, now insists that they must arm the hill people so they can defend themselves against the villagers. McCoy thinks this is a terrible idea and an excellent way to ensure permanent war. Kirk’s defense of his ‘solution’ is based in part on the history of the “brush wars” that took place “on the Asian continent” in the 20th century. I assume that this is a veiled reference to Vietnam, partly because of McCoy’s angry description of it going on “year after bloody year.” Kirk ‘reminds’ McCoy that this conflict ended because both sides eventually achieved a “balance of power” which made it impossible for one side to overrun the other. This, he is convinced, is the only way to save the hill people from total destruction: make sure both sides have _exactly the same_ number and kind of weapons available to them so their destructive capabilities are equal.  
  
In the past, I guess, we didn’t lose the Vietnam War. The Soviet Union never fell. The two empires achieved a “balance of power” which created enough stability to allow us one day to all work together and create utopia. And so, if we hadn’t handled the Asian “brush wars” the way we did, we would never have achieved space travel.  
  
I cannot blame Roddenberry for not knowing how the Vietnam War would end. But I do blame him—and all the other American idiots like him, past and present—for not understanding that the solution to intervention is not more intervention, that the solution to violence is not more violence, and that “balancing” the two biggest powers on the dead bodies of the third world is not the way you build utopia. I can blame him, and I do, for believing that the same Starfleet that adopted the Prime Directive can send its starships merrily about the galaxy starting proxy wars on ‘primitive’ planets because it’s not only the right thing to do, but the only thing to do.   
  
Kirk is portrayed as doing this reluctantly—he admires Tyree’s pacifism and his rejection of violence as a solution to conflict, and seems quite broken up about the end of innocence, etc. McCoy thinks that this is the result of Nona’s witchery; but when Kirk asks McCoy for an alternative solution, he can’t come up with one. He can’t because Roddenberry can’t because what he wants is to go on writing his fucking Western. But let’s just stop and think about this for about ten seconds here. In this situation, what might someone else do? Someone who was actually committed to peace instead of just given to spouting about it and then escalating the violence? What would someone who actually thought violence was wrong in and of itself do? What would a [shriia](http://www.plaidder.com/wof) do?  
  
Disarm the villagers, that’d be step one. They’ve got a limited number of these ‘flintlocks’ and without Klingon help they clearly won’t be able to make more. Get back to the ship, get out of range, and blow the whistle on the Klingons to Starfleet, that’d be step two. Kirk’s concerned that if it gets about that the Klingons have violated the treaty it might mean “interstellar war.” Yeah, maybe it would. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t; maybe the Klingons would abandon the planet and try to claim they were never there, and maybe Starfleet, if it were smart, would let them claim it, and maybe they would both stay the fuck away from Neural for a little while.  
  
Even if Kirk is right that revealing that the Klingons have violated the treaty would cause too much bloodshed--could we just admit, in that case, that arming the hill people is not an attempt to help _them_ , but an attempt to displace the violence Kirk fears erupting in his own world? Could we acknowledge that Kirk is arming the hill people not because of his concern for Tyree, but because he figures that if the hill people fight the villagers that means his people don’t have to fight the Klingons? Could we maybe see that the ethical thing to do here, as distinct from the strategic one, would be for the Federation and the Klingons to work their shit out on each other and leave the poor Planet of the Deerskins alone?  
  
No. No, we could not. Cause the Klingons are doing it, and that means we have to do it too. It wouldn’t bother you so much if you could say, well, it was 1968, we know better now. We do not. That’s what really sucks about this episode. I mean, OK, the mugato—but at least that’s hilarious. It may in fact be funnier than fizzbin, though of course unintentionally. This kind of badness is not funny; it’s tragic.  
  
Tyree being too noble to embrace the gun, Kirk decides he’ll talk to Nona and get her to work on him. After he comes upon her bathing by a waterfall (grrngrngngngn) Nona whips out her special enchantoplant and waves it in front of Kirk a couple times. Kirk is seized by brain-melting lust and puts the clinch on her just as Tyree crests the hill, flintlock in hand. Tyree drops the gun and runs off. And then a mugato attacks Nona.   
  
Kirk, whose brain is still immobilized by the sudden rush of testosterone, barely manages to pull it together long enough to phaser the mugato. Nona bashes him on the head with a rock, grabs his phaser, and runs off. McCoy and Tyree find Kirk; they chase after Nona.   
  
Nona, meanwhile, finds a party of 3 villagers and offers to take the phaser to their leader and make him rich and powerful. The 3 villagers decide to rape Nona instead.  
  
Well, Gene hasn’t gotten to write a rape scene since “Return of the Archons.” I guess he was overdue.   
  
Even in Roddenberry terms, though, this one’s special. There’s three of them attacking her; and they bite. Apart from being distressing in and of itself it’s an amazing demonstration of the rot at the root of Roddenberry’s ideas about women. Despite the fact that Nona has been established as a badass witchy woman who can turn any man who comes near her into a slobbering catatonic lust machine—despite the fact that she wears a knife at her belt which she evidently knows how to use—despite the fact that she is _carrying a phaser_ when they jump her—she is unable even to injure a single one of her assailants. There are several shots of her hand holding the phaser and pushing the buttons, but nothing ever happens. Why not? It’s not like Kirk would have put the safety on; he’s still very woozy when he torches the mugato, and she bashes him with a rock soon afterward. No, that only makes sense symbolically; the phaser that doesn’t work, the “power in the palm of her hand” that she is unable to use in her own defense, is a representation of the fundamental contradictions embedded in Roddenberry’s idea of female agency. Women are superpowerful when they’re ‘making’ the men around them do evil; but as soon as a man tries to have sex with a woman, she becomes completely defenseless.   
  
When Tyree, Kirk, and McCoy arrive upon the scene, the villagers assume that Nona was luring them into a trap and they stab her. A melee ensues during which Nona is flung face down and McCoy is the only one who goes over to her. After the villagers flee, Tyree nearly brains Kirk with a giant rock, but thinks better of it at last. The former pacifist Tyree tells his colleague to hunt the fleeing villagers down and kill them. He then tells Kirk he’s going to be needing a lot more of those rifles. After he departs, McCoy says, well, at least you got what you wanted. “Not what I wanted,” says Kirk. “What had to be.” He contacts Spock, who—  
  
Oh. Yes. Spock’s better now. How’d he get better, you ask?  
  
I don’t think I’m gonna tell you.  
  
No. No, I won’t. It’s just too awful.  
  
I guess I have to, don’t I.  
  
All right. Deep breath.  
  
So. Honey badger is lying there in sickbay with Nurse Chapel hovering by his side. Remember that Dr. Mbenga, the expert on Vulcan physiology, has told Nurse Chapel that if Spock shows signs of regaining consciousness she is to do whatever he tells her to do.  
  
So Spock shows signs of regaining consciousness. And he tells Nurse Chapel to hit him.  
She balks, of course. He says, “Damn you, strike me!” She gives him a feeble slap. “Harder!” yells Spock. She starts laying into him until Scotty runs in and hauls her off. Dr. Mbenga comes in, sits Spock up, and starts belting him in the head until Spock finally stops him and says he’s good now.   
  
You see, Vulcans, when they’re doing their special badass self-healing thing, they get so deep into unconsciousness that it’s hard to get back out, and pain helps them return to consciousness, and naturally the most efficient and humane way to deliver the necessary amount of pain is to beat the Vulcan in question severely about the head.  
  
Of all the ways in which Nurse Chapel and Spock have been forced by Gene Roddenberry to humiliate each other, this has got to be the worst. What the hell was he thinking? Is this supposed to be comic? Is it supposed to be dramatic? Is it supposed to be—God help us all—hot? Well, it’s none of those things, Gene; it’s just grotesque, heinous, and totally demeaning to everyone involved. That includes Dr. Mbenga, who up to now has been doing a good job with a small part and making you glad that with all the other crap going on at least Roddenberry managed to carry on the struggle by showing us another Black professional in this utopia of the future. And here he is, the Vulcan physiology expert we’ve always wanted and never had…slugging Spock.   
  
It’s horrible. It may be one of the three or four most horrible things about this episode. And it doesn’t help that the crazy bun on Nurse Chapel’s hairdo is a different color from the hair closer to her head. What is it with the wigs on this show? Could they not realize that it was worth it to spend the extra money and get something halfway plausible?  
  
All right. So. Kirk contacts Spock. He asks him to ask Scotty how long it would take to make 100 flintlocks. Scotty says, say what? Kirk repeats himself: “A  hundred serpents. Serpents for the garden of Eden.” Then he says they’re very tired and asks to be beamed up. The end.  
  
Christ almighty.   
  
Here’s my theory on why Ingalls decided to bill this one to “Jud Crucis.” It’s possible that before Roddenberry got to this script, there might have been some decent bits in it. The ending, for instance, is unusually and potentially intriguingly ambivalent. It’s clear that so far, Kirk’s effect on the “hill people” has been unremittingly negative and that in attempting to “save” Tyree and his people Kirk has essentially destroyed them. Which I guess makes sense given how close this plot seems to have been to the Vietnam War. And while usually the characters act oblivious to the potential consequences of their actions, this time there is enough unresolved tension around the ending that it’s possible, just possible, that Kirk is not entirely sure he’s done the right thing. McCoy certainly does not approve, though he does resign himself. Cheesy as it is, the “serpents” line, and the fact that Kirk asks to be beamed up before clarifying his instructions to Scotty, create some ambiguity about what will happen next. At any rate, whether or not this is “what had to be done,” it’s clearly unsatisfactory any way you look at it; and so this ending is in some ways more complex than any of the others.   
  
The whole Vulcan punching cure thing _has_ to have been Gene’s idea. Who else would come up with that shit--and think it was good enough to film? And what writer would have been bold enough to treat such an important and beloved character as Spock like the prop in a third-rate vaudeville gag? Maybe by the time he was done Roddenberry had introduced so much badness into the script that Ingalls didn’t consider it his any more and didn’t want to be associated with it.   
  
Maybe; maybe not. “The Alternative Factor” was pretty bad. Either way, between the two of them these guys produced what has to be one of the worst episodes ever…at least so far.  
  



	48. RETURN TO TOMORROW

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a great episode which was unfortunately given a nondescript title which conveys nothing about what makes it awesome. This is another "hidden gem" directed by Ralph Senensky, who really seems to have had the magic touch when it came to character-driven episodes requiring emotional nuance. He himself has always been very down on this episode because he was prevented from [realizing his vision](http://senensky.com/return-to-tomorrow/) by the insane constraints imposed on him by the network. When Desilu was sold, the show's already insane production schedule was made even shorter, which is one of the major things that contributes to the show's eventual decline. 
> 
> Regardless, I found "Return to Tomorrow" unexpectedly thought-provoking and moving, and it includes some great performances. If you watch it and decide you like it too, go visit Senensky's post about it and drop him a comment.

**STARDATE: March 29, 2012**

**RETURN TO TOMORROW**  
 **By John Kingsbridge (John T. Dugan)**  
  
One of the scariest things about getting old is realizing how much you’ve forgotten. I had no clear memory of this episode. And yet, not only must I have seen it, it must have made a significant impression on me.  
  
 **The Summary:** As we join our heroes—including Sulu, for what seems like the first time in forever—they are on the bridge trying to figure out what’s going on with this distress signal they’ve picked up; as they are hundreds of light years from the back of beyond, they can’t fathom what would be out there sending it. They trace it back to a class M planet which has earthlike properties but appears to have lost all of its atmosphere during a cataclysmic event half a million years or so ago. As they approach the planet, they hear a deep booming disembodied voice address them by name. The voice is Sargon, and he basically tells them he’s brought them to this planet, and why don’t they transport down to this chamber that’s buried beneath hundreds of meters of solid rock and we’ll talk about why. Kirk decides to go; he asks Spock to stay behind, but then the lights go out and everything stops humming. Kirk says, hey, honey badger, come along, and everything goes back to normal. Down at the transporter Kirk discovers a hot lieutenant that he hadn’t ordered. Lieutenant Mulhall says she received an order to report, though she doesn’t know who from. Kirk, Spock, and Mulhall beam down along with a very mistrustful McCoy.  
  
They materialize in their parents’ basement, excuse me, the subterranean chamber. The paneling slides back to reveal another chamber, the centerpiece of which is a large glowing frosted Lucite orb, which looks like a palantir and which I guess you could call an Eye of Sargon, since that’s where his consciousness is living. We learn that there was, half a million years ago, a gigantic war on Sargon’s planet that completely destroyed it, but that a few survivors have kept their consciousnesses on ice in these orbs. Sargon takes possession of Kirk’s body, sending Kirk’s consciousness into the orb. This is most distressing to McCoy, especially since with Sargon in him Kirk’s metabolic rate doubles and his organs start working so hard that he’s exhausted to the point of collapse after about ten minutes. While in Kirk, Sargon explains that what he wants is for the three of them to allow him, his wife Thalassa, and the only other survivor—Hennock, who was on the Other Side in the war—to inhabit Kirk, Mulhall, and Spock’s bodies so that they can build android bodies that they can then inhabit. In return they will teach humankind all the wonderful things that they know how to do. As Kirk’s body sags, Sargon goes back to the orb and sends Kirk back to his body.  
  
Kirk explains that during the switch with Sargon, for an instant, “he and I were one,” and that he thinks they should totally do this. McCoy thinks he’s insane. Sargon says go back to the ship, think about it, let us know, we’ll wait.  
  
Back on the Enterprise, Kirk convenes a meeting involving Spock, McCoy, Mulhall, and Scotty. He says they all have to give their consent or else they won’t do it. McCoy is at last talked around. The initial possession takes place in sickbay. Sargon/Kirk and Thalassa/Mulhall are profoundly moved by the experience of being able to touch in physical form again; Hennock, once he’s into Spock, is mainly stoked about the fact that he drew honey badger, whose body he correctly assesses as being 1000% more badass than the other two. To keep the human bodies from burning out, Hennock/Spock prepares a “metabolic reduction formula” that will reduce physical processes to normal levels. When Nurse Chapel realizes that Hennock/Spock has given Kirk a different formula, Hennock/Spock explains that this is because he’s going to kill Sargon/Kirk so that he can stay in Spock’s body long-term—and then, of course, mind-controls Chapel so that she forgets all this. Chapel continues to be vaguely bothered by something, and McCoy continues to be “filled with foreboding,” while Hennock starts working on Thalassa, who is none too keen on being put in an android body that will not have sensation.  
  
Well, Thalassa tries to talk Sargon into keeping the bodies (she believes that over time they would eventually adjust to the possession and the injections wouldn’t be necessary). The kiss she plants on him to win him over must have been something, because after it, Kirk drops dead. Yes, dead. As in, “He’s dead, Jim,” minus the Jim. Sargon’s consciousness is unable to return to the orb and is pronounced dead by McCoy. McCoy manages to restore the vital processes of Kirk’s body; but of course Kirk’s consciousness is still in the orb, and it’s been established that Kirk doesn’t have the psychic balls it would take to bust out of it. Thalassa/Mulhall tries to bargain with McCoy: you let me keep Mulhall’s body, and I’ll put Kirk back where he belongs. McCoy says no dice. Thalassa starts in with the “we are gods to you” talk, and puts a purple pain whammy on McCoy. She comes to her senses and drops the whammy, saying that Sargon was right: “The temptations within a living body are too great.” Sargon’s big ol’ booming disembodied voice approves of this sentiment. Turns out Sargon’s consciousness is not gone; it’s in the Enterprise itself.  
  
McCoy is sent out of the room so Thalassa/Mulhall, Nurse Chapel, and the shipembodied Sargon can make a plan to deal with Hennock. While waiting, McCoy sees Nurse Chapel go by, curiously not responding to his salutation. Upon returning to sickbay, he sees that Kirk’s back, and Mulhall’s back, but all three orbs are toast. Pointing out in his inimitable fashion that “Spock’s consciousness was in one of those,” he is told by Kirk that there was no other way. Kirk then says to put together a poison hypo for Spock, because Hennock needs to be assassinated forthwith.  
  
Well, they’re right about that, because up on the bridge Hennock/Spock is putting the purple pain on Uhura. McCoy, Kirk, Mulhall, and Chapel bust onto the bridge; but Hennock just laughs at them and tells Chapel to take the hypo and give it to McCoy instead. Chapel makes as if to do this, but zots Spock’s arm instead; Spock drops to the floor, and Hennock’s consciousness absconds into the unknown. As Kirk kneels over honey badger’s body mournfully wishing there had been another way, Sargon’s deep booming voice says don’t worry, I fixed it for you. Spock is alive! Turns out they only thought it was poison in that hypo. Hennock thought so too, since he was reading their minds, so he fled as soon as Spock lost consciousness. Hooray! But where was Spock all this time?  
  
Three guesses. Oh, let’s not kid ourselves, we only need one.  
  
Yeah, it was Nurse Chapel.  
  
Kirk asks Sargon how he can repay them for this happy ending. Sargon says, it’d be neat if I could be in you one last time to say goodbye to Thalassa. Kirk says, OK. Sargon takes over and Sargon/Kirk and Mulhall/Thalassa have a very touching farewell kiss from which Kirk and Mulhall eventually have to extract themselves after Sargon and Thalassa head for oblivion. **The End.**  
  
It’s a little embarrassing to discover, at the age of 42, that you learned everything you know about demonic possession from an episode of Star Trek. [WOFsters](http://www.plaidder.com/wof/) will see exactly what I’m talking about and non-WOFsters won’t care; so let’s move on.  
  
This episode was a surprise—in a good way. I honestly think that it would rank higher amongst the faithful if it had a more memorable title. “Return to Tomorrow” doesn’t convey any of the interesting things about this episode. It sounds more like another one of those damn time travel plots—in fact, I went into it assuming that it would be that stupid Gary 7 episode. But I would put this into a category with “Metamorphosis” as an episode which deserves to be better-remembered and better-appreciated—and which, not coincidentally, actually sort of treats women like they’re human.  
  
Because there was no real attempt to ensure consistency across different writers, there are some identifiable variations in characterization which are related to varying conceptions of what the Enterprise’s mission really is. The Kirk who always winds up far from home trapped in some escalating craziness on some planet nobody’s ever seen before is not necessarily the same Kirk who keeps tangling with the Klingons over third-party planets. Kingsbridge’s conception of the show is clearly stated by Kirk at the beginning: contacting intelligent alien life is their top priority. This emphasis on the boldly-going is the mission that usually comes with my favorite Kirk—the guy who is open to the unknown and willing to roll the dice on interacting in a non-hostile way with an alien species. This is the Kirk who worked it out with the horta, who appreciated the Companion’s love for Cochran—and who, in this episode, is perfectly willing to share his body with an alien, even though he can see a lot of ways in which that could end badly.  
  
One thing I like about this episode is that instead of just allowing his characters to do something which is obviously stupid and pretend it’s smart—as in, say, “Operation: Annihilate”—Kingsbridge directly addresses the stupidity of this move during the briefing scene. McCoy objects to Sargon’s proposal as “indecent”—intuitively picking up on the fact this body-borrowing creates intimacies that go way beyond the boundaries of normative human sexuality—and can’t understand why Kirk is willing to do this. Scotty’s with him:  
  
 **SCOTTY: Are they in their right minds, doctor?**  
McCOY: No comment.  
  
Kirk says, well, yeah, it is dangerous—but that risk is necessary to change and progress. In a speech that would warm my heart if only they wouldn’t constantly clobber me with the inspirational soundtrack, Kirk reminds everyone that there’s no point to going on a five-year mission seeking out new life and new civilizations if you’re going to play it safe:  
  
 **KIRK: I’m in command. I could order this. But I’m not. Because Dr. McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this. But I must point out that the possibilities, the potential, for knowledge and advancement is equally great. Risk…risk is our business. That’s what this starship is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her.**  
  
Amen, I say. We have done ourselves and the rest of the world a lot of damage lately by defining risk as everywhere and always unacceptable—for us. I can get behind a Kirk who does not see himself and his ship as so goddamn precious that they cannot be risked for the greater good of the galaxy.  
  
Another thing I like about the briefing scene and the episode in general is the attention paid to the issue of consent. You don’t need me to remind you that so far this show is not blazing any trails of awesome in that area. But although Sargon makes it clear that he has the Enterprise and all aboard it in his power, it is important to him—and to Kingsbridge’s sense of him as a ‘good’ character—that he do this with the consent of the subjects. Kirk approaches his team the same way. All of which means that finally—FINALLY!—a woman is asked for her consent, up front, before she is invaded by another being. And when Thalassa tries to trade Mulhall for Kirk, McCoy actually says that Mulhall’s body doesn’t belong to them, that it belongs to a “young woman,” and that “neither Jim nor I can barter a body we don’t own.” Jeez, look at this, a man saying a woman’s body belongs to her even though another being is living inside it. Shit really IS different in the future!  
  
Asked why she’s up for this, Mulhall says that she’s interested to observe it as a scientist. And that’s another thing I like about this episode—FOR ONCE, the hot lieutenant is actually credible as someone who might know some fucking science. Mulhall is played by Diana Muldaur, who will return in a later TOS episode and who—and this was another thing I’d forgotten—had a long run on ST:TNG as Dr. Pulaski. She reminds me a little bit of Patricial Neal, only her voice is slightly less gravelly. With a kind of enigmatic half-smile, an alto voice, and a lot more gravitas than you typically see in the female guest stars, Muldaur (with help from Kingsbridge’s script) puts both Mulhall and Thalassa on par with the boys and makes them both full participants. It’s true that Mulhall’s specialty is “astrobiology”—whatever the hell that might be—and that Thalassa has the obligatory feminine concern about her body and her appearance. Hennock gets to her by showing her an android body which is still male-looking and telling her it’s hers; he promises to “add some female features and texturing” after she occupies it. That’s what finally pushes her to make the play to McCoy about keeping Mulhall's body. Mulhall/Thalassa even looks at herself in the same reflective lid that Shahna used in Triskelion. (Do they just go out to the catering stand and swipe one of the chafing dishes whenever they want a character to see her own reflection?) But Sargon is obviously tempted by sensuality as well, and Hennock has spent the past half million years thinking about how the instant he gets out of this fucking globe he’s going to find himself a badass body and never fucking leave it. Thalassa is never allowed to operate outside the patriarchy—even though it’s her moral stand that turns the plot around, she’s being watched over by Sargon as if he’s God the Father—and neither is Mulhall; but compared to what normally happens to women on this show, “Return to Tomorrow” is a frickin’ feminist statement.  
  
Thalassa/Mulhall’s scenes with Sargon/Kirk, while somewhat cheesily written, are still very touching; Muldaur and Shatner manage to bring across the fact that this is a long-term—looooooooong term—relationship rather than the tawdry affairs Kirk is normally clinching himself into. And although it’s annoying that Nurse Chapel squees like a chick after Kirk/Sargon and Mulhall/Thalassa act out their farewell, and although I’m not sure how exactly Sargon and Thalassa can be planning to experience oblivion together, their farewell is still moving. Kirk and Mulhall are a little embarrassed but it’s not overdone, and their reaction doesn’t undermine the commitment to risk that both of them share or the respect for each other which is tacitly assumed throughout the episode (once we get past the moment where Kirk is flabbergasted to find a WOMAN in the landing party).  
  
Oh. Yeah. I mentioned Nurse Chapel.  
  
For once—I keep typing that phrase—Chapel’s thing for Spock is used in a way that doesn’t degrade both characters. In general, Chapel’s characterization in this episode is way above par, no doubt because Roddenberry was not let near it. Hennock puts the moves on Chapel the instant he wakes up, with a kind of villain’s charm that makes Hennock/Spock as charismatic as he is evil. But though Chapel is susceptible to the flattery, that doesn’t stop her from noticing that Hennock/Spock is doing it wrong; and at least in this episode, when she acts like a moron, it’s always because she’s being mind-controlled. The crew’s reaction to Chapel’s confession that “we shared consciousness for a while” is a little awkward, but it’s not made too painful. Spock says he went into Chapel because she was the last place Hannock would expect to find him; but we are free to infer that there was more to it than that.  
  
Anyway, consciousness-sharing is about the only form of intimacy those two characters could have that would leave either with a shred of dignity. And that, my friends, is what is really interesting about possession (and emanation, and projection, and traveling, and telepathy, and all that other good stuff): it expands the possibilities for human relationship. In this case, in addition to finally giving Chapel a chance to commune with Spock, it allows for same-sex intimacies not dreamt of in canon (Sargon and Kirk becoming “one;” Thalassa and Mulhall must be psychically gettin’ it on too during their switches, but sadly nobody gets to comment on this). It also produces some pretty funky acting. Shatner’s performance of Sargon possessing Kirk for the first time is…I’m still trying to decide whether it’s awesome or awful. He caresses his own body like he was Norma Desmond, emoting in a truly surreal way about the joy of feeling his blood circulate. But the kind of rusty walk he does as Sargon learns to manipulate the body is a really nice bit of physical acting. Muldaur does a good job of differentiating Mulhall from Thalassa—not just because she changes her hairstyle, though for once the wigs are under control—and Nimoy just has himself a romp as Hennock. So ironic, so sarcastic, so snarky, so very very evil, and yet so comfortable with a particular kind of libertine’s sensuality which is not overstated but clearly conveyed; and above all, so much fun to watch. The scene in which he patiently explains to Chapel why it is that she has to kill Kirk is priceless.  
  
I should also point out that this episode is a rebuttal to those who would claim that Star Trek’s badness derived primarily from budget restraints. I bet the producers’ hearts beat faster when they read this script; it has to have been one of the cheapest episodes they ever made. It required only one new set and only one guest star; most of the action happens on the ship and all the new ‘characters’ are played by the regular cast. Even the disembodied Sargon voice was apparently done by James Doohan. (While embodied, the characters’ voices are manipulated versions of the regular actors’ voices. Kind of an interesting effect, except it renders Thalassa’s claim that nobody will ever know if she keeps Mulhall’s body kind of nonsensical. “Hey…did Lieutenant Mulhall’s voice always have that much reverb?”)  
  
There are, of course, problems with it. Partly because of the need to secure consent, the setup takes a long time and gets things off to a slow start. It’d have been nice to spend more time with the possessed people. However, like a lot of those All-Powerful Good characters of yore, Sargon is pretty boring; he’s really got no more personality than Apollo did in “Who Mourns for Adonais?” and it’s kind of a testament to Shatner that the embodied Sargon is as interesting as he is. And of course the ending is just wish fulfillment; it’s also so rushed that we don’t get too much emotion out of Kirk’s mourning for honey badger. There is also the fact that because of the huge power differential the regulars don’t actually get to do much except when they’re possessed. And, you know, the writing, there is some cheese.  
  
Nevertheless, I am going to restore this one to what was obviously once a privileged place in my memory. I’ll need some fond memories to get me through the next few episodes. Up next we have “By Any Other Name”…but I’m only three workouts away from “The Omega Glory.”


	49. PATTERNS OF FORCE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kirk and Spock become The Inglorious Basterds. Say...no. If someone's writing crossover slash, I don't want to know about it.
> 
> Actually, my favorite thing about this episode is its bracing defense of nonintervention. That, and the crazy shirtlessness of it all.

STARDATE: April 2, 2012

PATTERNS OF FORCE  
By John Meredyth Lucas  
  
In which our heroes fight Nazis. For real.  
  
Sort of.  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise approaches Echos in search of John Gill, a historian who was sent to Echos a few years ago as a “cultural observer.” He’s been out of contact for 6 months, so the Enterprise was sent to find him. It is established that Gill was a model historian and that Kirk studied under him at the Academy. (Spock, in what has to be the worst line delivery of Leonard Nimoy’s career, informs us awkwardly that he too respects Gill because he “treated Earth history in terms of causes and motivations instead of dates and events.”) While Kirk explains that the Echosians were a warlike and disorganized people while the Zeons were further advanced both culturally and technologically, a rocket armed with a nuclear warhead is launched from Echos. Chekov phasers it before it hits. Greatly surprised at this proof of accelerated technological development, Kirk and Spock beam down in mufti; Kirk takes the precaution of having McCoy install “subcutaneous transponders” so the Enterprise will be able to lock on to them and beam them up even if they lose their communicators. (Good idea. Wonder why it is not implemented more often.)  
  
Kirk and Spock, arrayed in the local costume, beam down and encounter a panicked and running guy  who falls flat on the pavement and yells at them to hide because “they’re after me.” Spock and Kirk duck behind a wall and watch as a group of jackbooted thugs in Nazi uniforms show up, beat the guy up some more, and drag him away. When I say “Nazi uniforms,” I do not speak metaphorically; they are actually Nazi uniforms, swastikas, insignia, and all. Kirk notes the exactness of the replication; Spock notes that the odds of another culture developing independently in a way that so closely replicates Nazi Germany are so small as to be negligible; I note that it is unfortunate that regular viewers could probably still remember this exchange when “The Omega Glory” aired two weeks later.  
  
Anyhow, on a convenient telescreen, a newscaster appears to talk them through a newsreel in which they see hot Nazi lieutenant Daras being recognized for her service to the Fatherland. The “Zeons” are playing the role of the Jews in this scenario; Zeons are being purged from the capital city and a “final decision” about Zeons seems to hover in the offing; and the Fuhrer whose portrait is hanging on the wall of the studio turns out to be…John Gill.   
  
Kirk and Spock are confronted by a Nazi soldier; he is easily nerve-pinched, and Spock soon has his uniform on, complete with ear-hiding helmet. They then encounter a Gestapo officer, who is similarly rendered unconscious and naked while Kirk dons his uniform. Kirk and Spock then strike out for headquarters, hoping to see John Gill and find out WTF is happening. They almost get into the building before a suspicious Nazi officer asks Spock to take off his helmet. The ears are revealed, and soon Kirk and Spock are in the basement cellblock with a Nazi guard flogging their denuded torsos. Party chairman Eneg arrives and tells the guard to knock it off and put them in a cell to let their “pain argue with them.” Naturally the guards put Kirk and Spock into a cell together, right next to the cell holding the guy who first tried to warn them. Kirk and Spock use the crystals in the transponders to focus the light from the bulb in their cell into a laser that cuts through the latch on their cell bars. They then overpower the guard. Kirk takes his uniform and they go off to the SS science lab where, Eneg happened to mention, their communicators and phasers have been taken for examination. They make it into the science lab, where Spock finds the disassembled communicators; the phasers have been sent off for further testing elsewhere. They are surprised by a guard, who is soon overpowered; Spock suits up again (in the future, all military uniforms will automatically adjust to fit the body of any male who puts them on), and the three of them head out for the underground.  
  
Down in the sewers, Izak (the Zeon prisoner who’s guiding them) finds Avram, the local resistance leader. While Kirk and Spock go off to reassemble the communicator, they are surprised by hot Lieutenant Daras and some more guards. Daras shoots Avram, who collapses. Kirk tries to get her gun; it looks like it’s curtains for him until it is revealed that the whole thing was a set-up to make sure that Kirk and Spock weren’t spies. Daras reveals that she is in the resistance too. Kirk finally tells everyone who they are and who John Gill is. Daras et al. tell him that it seems that the one really calling the shots is the deputy fuhrer, Malacon. Kirk insists that if they find Gill they might be able to fix things.   
  
The Fuhrer is giving a big speech, attended by all the party elite; Kirk, Spock, Izak show up pretending to be a film crew shooting a documentary about Daras. They bluff their way in. Spock sneaks a peek into the curtained-off broadcast booth and sees John Gill propped up in the chair looking totally out of it. Kirk decides they need to get McCoy down there to find out what’s being done to him; so while the speech is going on they head into the cloakroom and get Uhura to send McCoy down in yet another Nazi uniform. Eneg and some guards bust in on them—they’ve located the communicator’s signal—but Eneg is apparently convinced by Kirk’s story about them having to take McCoy into the cloakroom because he was drunk. In they go to the broadcast booth. McCoy can tell that Gill is drugged, but whatever they’re using on him is some serious shit; a ‘general stimulant’ fails to restore him to consciousness. A mindmeld renders him capable of responding to questions but not of much else. Kirk finally gets the story out of Gill: Gill figured he could unify Echos by establishing a fascist state, choosing Nazi Germany as the model because it was so ‘efficient.’ This worked OK as long as Gill was in charge, but then Malacon started drugging him and taking over and now everything is all evil.  
  
Eneg busts in with some more guards. Kirk fingers Spock as a Zeon agent and says they’ll make a “present of him to Malacon.” Izak tells Eneg that Spock has to be taken directly to Malacon. Since, as it turns out, Eneg’s in the resistance too, he does it. While Daras, McCoy, Izak, and Eneg ‘play for time’ out in the screening room, Kirk resorts to increasingly desperate measures to bring Gill around (including, I should note, the Vulcan punching cure). Back in the screening room, Gill reappears and starts telling everyone that they’ve been betrayed by Malacon. Malacon machine-guns the broadcast booth window, mortally wounding Gill. Malacon is then shot. Eneg takes over and tells everyone to calm down.  
  
Back in the booth, Gill gasps out his last words to Kirk and dies. Eneg and Daras show up, promising that they will lead Echos in the right direction. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam back up.  
  
Back on the Enterprise, Spock is still wondering how someone with “such a logical mind” could have gotten fucked up enough to think this was a good idea. Kirk explains that Gill’s mistake was in thinking that the Nazi regime was evil because of the people running it, instead of realizing that it was the system itself that was the problem. McCoy and Spock get into it about whether humans are clever or stupid; Kirk calls this off, says he doesn’t want “another civil war,” and tells Chekov to “take us out of here at warp 2…and hurry.” **The End.**  
  
It’s interesting seeing this episode so close to “A Piece of the Action.” In a lot of ways they’re the same plot: the Enterprise arrives to find ‘contamination’ on an alien planet which has led to the exact replication of a specific Earth culture; Kirk, with Spock and McCoy’s help, attempts to correct the contamination. Though “Patterns of Force” is not a comic episode, it uses some of the same tactics we saw in “Piece.” Kirk is, once again, a better actor than Spock; Spock even flags this by dryly remarking, when Kirk admires his new Gestapo uniform, that Kirk “should make a very convincing Nazi.” As in “Piece,” Spock is eventually caught up in the caper; after they successfully infiltrate the party, Spock admits to feeling the “exhilaration” that comes with beating the odds.   
  
However, the plot at times almost seems to be deliberately critiquing “Piece of the Action.” Gill’s objective in starting all this misery was the same objective that motivates Kirk’s solution in “Piece”: the unification and stabilization of a factionalized, violent, fragmented society. In both cases the solution is the kind of ‘unity’ produced by dictatorship. Whereas Kirk does it by crowning a local dictator, Gill simplifies things by installing himself as dictator. But while Kirk never seems to appreciate what his attempt to ‘correct’ the contamination has inflicted on the Iotians, the dying Gill acknowledges that his first mistake was intervening at all: “The noninterference directive…is…the only way.” The episode underlines this by having Eneg and Daras, after thanking Kirk et al. for dealing with Gill and Malacon, tell them bluntly to get the hell out and let the indigenous people handle it. And that’s what they do, after Kirk observes that the planet is “in good hands,” and Spock remarks that once the Echosians and Zeons learn to work together the system will make “a fine addition to the Federation.”  
  
Especially after “A Private Little War,” it’s nice to see the Prime Directive actually validated, even if they have to go back to Nazi Germany to do it. While Kirk and Spock are, of course, interfering by trying to get to Gill, it’s made pretty clear that they could not possibly have succeeded without the cooperation of the local resistance; if Eneg and Daras hadn’t already infiltrated the party Kirk and Spock would have been killed several times over. The ending establishes that it’s Kirk and Spock who have been used to achieve the goals of the resistance, not the other way around; after all, Kirk winds up sacrificing his hero Gill (even before Gill is machine-gunned, Kirk risks Gill’s life to bring him to consciousness) in order to end the regime.   
  
Lucas’s script, in fact, is more interesting as a critique of his fellow writers’ treatment of the Prime Directive than it as a critique of Nazi Germany. The analysis of fascism doesn’t get beyond the basics: hatred of the Zeons (who are, no doubt by design, physically indistinguishable from Echosians) is manufactured so that the Echosians will have something to “hold them together,” a fascist structure gives so much power to the leader and his underlings that they can’t “resist the urge to play God,” absolute power corrupts absolutely, and so on. While Kirk’s final comment rejects the idea that the evils of the Nazi regime were merely an expression of Hitler’s own evil nature, Gill’s final speech actually affirms that idea by identifying Malacon as the source of all the evil on Echos.   
  
Speaking of Gill…so he says he chose Nazi Germany because it was the most “efficient” nation-state the Earth ever spawned. Spock even agrees with him. Please, honey badger, tell me how devoting huge amounts of money and manpower to the completely unnecessary project of liquidating millions of people who would otherwise be contributing to the economy is efficient. The fact that this insane project was carried out very effectively does not, to my mind, make the Third Reich efficient. What Gill evidently really means—at least based on the way Spock glosses him—is not so much that the Third Reich was efficient as that it was powerful. But that’s not even the point. The only thing that would explain Gill choosing Nazi Germany as the model is that deep down, somewhere, he always thought there was something cool about Nazi Germany. It’s like Kirk, Scotty, and McCoy sitting around in that briefing room talking about how much they admire Khan while also deploring him. Kirk stays focused on the evil; but even he seems to get into the uniforms.  
  
Of course, Gill intended his Nazi state to be kinder and gentler; and it’s true that far as atrocities go, Gill’s neo-Nazis cannot hold a candle to the originals. If you compare this episode to, say, Rod Serling’s “Death’s Head Revisited” (season 2 of _The Twilight Zone_ ), you realize just how many punches the Star Trek team is pulling. Though we do see thugs beat up Izak, and we hear plenty of ugly talk about “Zeon pigs,” and we do hear from Avram that Izak’s fiancé was shot down in the streets and left to bleed to death over a five-hour period, most of the violence that we see in this episode is directed at Kirk and Spock; and it’s highly unconvincing. During the flogging scene, Shatner does a decent job of reacting to the rag mop, excuse me, ‘flail’ that the guard is whapping him with—honey badger’s being flogged too, but guess what, Nazis, honey badger don’t care—but the ‘wounds’ on his and Spock’s back are clearly painted on top of unbroken skin. (The only concession to verisimilitude is that Spock’s streaks are green while Kirk’s are red.) We don’t hear about death camps, ghettos, mass graves, or anything else that would indicate that the Zeons are being destroyed on the scale that the Jews were. Zeons aren’t even wearing yellow stars, or anything equivalent.  
  
This is just to say that what we have here is not so much an exploration of the Holocaust and human history as another revamped World War II movie. The focus is really on Kirk and Spock outwitting the Nazis, which most of the time doesn’t seem that difficult. The most impressive scheme is the homemade laser beam, which scene also renders the Kirk/Spock subtext even more obvious than it was in “Amok Time.” Both Kirk and Spock are shirtless, remember--you can tell whose torso it is that normally gets denuded, because Shatner’s chest is freshly waxed whereas Nimoy’s chest seems to have been protected by the noninterference directive—and handcuffed. When Spock points out that he’ll need some kind of platform to get close enough to the lightbulb to make the laser, Kirk says that he “would be honored,” and kneels down on the floor while Spock, literally, mounts him. There are shots of the two of them during this sequence which cannot possibly have failed to suggest to the boys in the editing room exactly what they were suggesting to me. Of course Spock has to play this scene straight—kneeling on Kirk’s flayed back, he pauses to express his bafflement over the idiom “hit the broad side of a barn,” thus comically extending Kirk’s agony—but the fact that this is all happening in this S&M Lite context makes you wonder if all of this was really entirely unintentional.  
  
As far as taking the Nazi thing seriously goes, the best moments involve Spock—who, as the one character who can’t pass as Echosian, often winds up as the target of Echosian racism. When he’s forced to take off his helmet by the guards, he stares back at them with the same look he had when the Romulans and their ears were first revealed in “Balance of Terror”: yeah, assholes, here I am, so now what. When Kirk—as it first appears—sacrifices Spock to Eneg and the guards in order to protect himself, Spock looks a little surprised, and perhaps a little hurt by the betrayal. Spock’s contemptuous endurance of Malacon’s self-satisfied disquisition on Spock’s hereditary and racial defects, ironized of course by our knowledge of honey badger’s badassery, is also priceless. The fact that Nimoy himself is Jewish adds a couple more layers to this onion, but I don’t have time to peel them. I would only note that I’d forgotten that this episode contains what is now one of my favorite McCoy/Spock exchanges. McCoy shows up half-dressed, complaining that the boots the computer gave him are too small. Spock tells him to stop whining:  
  
 **SPOCK: There is a logical solution, doctor. Point your toe, grasp both sides of the boot with equal force, and push. This is no time for emotionalism.**  
  
I don’t know, it just reminds me so much of trying to get PJ’s shoes on so we can get out the frickin’ door. Which sort of works for their characters in that situation.  
  
So, there we have it. Up next: “By Any Other Name.”


	50. BY ANY OTHER NAME

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Truly, April 2012 was the cruelest month. We are now into the period where the network executives were basically starving Star Trek to death by continually diminishing its resources, and the results are apparent. Jerome Bixby is capable of doing much better work than this; but even so, this script would probably have been more effective if they'd had more time and resources. But it did give us a couple immortal lines.

**STARDATE: April 8, 2012**

**BY ANY OTHER NAME**  
 **By D. C. Fontana and Jerome Bixby, from a story by Jerome Bixby**  
  
This one is…well…it is green.  
  
 **The Summary:** Kirk, McCoy, Spock, and a matched set of male and female redshirts beam down to a planet from which they have received a distress call. It’s apparently uninhabited but they do spot a matched set of male and female jumpsuited humanoids wearing very strange belt buckles sauntering toward them. (For whatever reason, these aliens have decided that all the women’s jumpsuits will have backless halter tops. Worked all right for the guest star, but #2 had to have a strap installed across the back to keep both sides up.) The guy introduces himself as Rojan, the captain of the Kelvin vessel, thanks Kirk for responding, and demands that Kirk surrender the Enterprise. Kirk demurs. He and the others are all zapped by the belt buckles and frozen stiff by what will eventually be identified as a “neural paralyzer.” The Kelvins, having demonstrated their ability to turn everyone into human statues at the touch of a button, explain that they are from the Andromeda galaxy and they are part of a multigenerational mission to find and colonize another galaxy, cause theirs is going to be uninhabitable in a few millennia. Their own vessel has been destroyed, so what they’re going to do is take the Enterprise, modify it to be able to make the trip back to Andromeda in a mere 300 years, and then head back home to start organizing the colonization of the Milky Way and the conquering of humanity. They pen the landing party up in a cave with bars, keeping them as hostages while more Kelvins apparate, I’m sorry, somehow beam themselves aboard the Enterprise and take the joint over.  
  
Kirk asks Spock to try out the ol’mindmeld on Kelinda, the female Kelvin who’s guarding the door. Spock does; but contacting Kelinda’s mind provokes a shock that sends him flying across the cave. Kelinda does in fact come into the cell, and Kirk knocks her out and grabs her magic belt buckle. (In the future, hitting a woman very hard on the upper arm with the side of your hand will be enough to render her unconscious.) They run out of the cave…where they are instantly paralyzed by the other Kelvins. Rojan confiscates the purloined belt buckle and, as punishment, reduces both redshirts to a pair of multisided geometrical forms made of…I dunno, it kind of looks like that crap they make acoustical ceiling tile out of. Who knows, maybe it was asbestos. Whatever it is, it’s about the size of a large orange and it is supposed to some sort of human bouillon cube which contains the “essence” of whatever individual it has been reduced from. (In the future, the clothing one wears and the objects one holds will be considered part of one’s ‘essence.’) Rojan crumbles Hot Yeoman 9.0’s bouillion cube before Kirk’s outraged eyes, then reconstitutes the other.  
  
Back in the cave, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy hatch a plan to get back to sickbay and create some sort of jamming device using some of McCoy’s neuralwhatsamajiggers. They have Spock go into his special Vulcan trance, convince the guard that he’s sick, and get the guard to allow McCoy and Spock to be beamed up. They keep up the pretence long enough to fool Tomar, the Kelvin guard posted in sickbay, who then leaves them to plot in peace. Kirk is eventually beamed up as well; but when McCoy and Spock try to knock out the aliens’ power source they discover that it is impregnable. They instead rig the matter/antimatter drive so that Kirk can self-destruct the ship at the moment it passes through the “negative energy barrier” at the edges of the galaxy. Kirk, however, decides not to push the button, so through the edge of the galaxy they go. The Kelvins, once through the barrier, reduce all “nonessential personnel” to bouillion cubes. This includes Uhura and Chekov; and indeed, one hardly notices they’re gone. Soon Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty are the only ones left in human form.   
  
It becomes apparent that the Kelvins, who are normally vast multitentacled beings with advanced intelligence but little embodied enjoyment, are starting to develop an interest in this ‘sensation’ business that comes with humanoid form. Kirk decides that they must distract the Kelvins by stimulating their senses to the point where they go crazy from the overload and can be overtaken. The first idea that occurs to a delighted Scotty is to take Tomar into his quarters and get him hammered. During the many hours that it takes Scotty to execute this plan, McCoy convinces Hamar, another Kelvin, to get regular injections of some kind of stimulant that makes people super-irritable. Kirk, of course, puts the moves on Kelinda, who at first proves comically resistant to them. Rojan, however, starts to get jealous; he forbids Kelinda to fraternize with Kirk, which of course sends her right back to him. Spock, meanwhile, hangs out with Rojan, turning the screw until he can’t stand the jealousy any more and goes down to the recreation room where Kirk and Kelinda are locked in a steamy embrace. Rojan is outraged. Kirk smacks him around. A fight ensues; Kirk gets Rojan in a headlock and convinces him that they just can’t handle humanoid form, and they’d better reconsider this idea of remaining humanoid for another 300 years during the return trip to Andromeda. Rojan finally agrees to approach the colonization problem diplomatically by contacting the Federation, which has a list of planets suitable for colonization and would be happy to donate a few to the Kelvins under the right circumstances. Rojan and Kelinda--who finds Kirk “interesting” but prefers Rojan for long-term companionship--and his pals will go back to the planet where Kirk picked them up and live there in the meanwhile. We presume that the crew will be reconstituted first, though we don’t see it happen. **The End.**  
  
I blame “By Any Other Name” for the undeserved neglect of “Return to Tomorrow.” They were only separated by one episode, and given that both episodes focus on alien beings coping with the sensational temptations of the human body, Darth Julie probably isn’t the only one who got them confused. But it’s unjust—it’s an outrage, I tell you. “Return to Tomorrow” is SO MUCH BETTER than “By Any Other Name.”  
  
Why? Well, I’ll tell you.  
  
First of all, “By Any Other Name” is badly made. It’s like Mark Daniels read the script and said to himself, “Christ almighty…let’s just get this over with quick.” Or maybe John Meredyth Lucas, who produced this one, spent too much time squirreled away rewriting “Patterns of Force.” Whatever the reason, a crappy job was done by all, especially in the scenes shot on the planet. There are only three special effects called for in this episode: the neural paralyzer, the apparating (the sudden appearance of a Kelvin out of thin air), and the reduction of humans to those bouillion cubes. None of this requires skills the production team hasn’t used before; and yet they are all executed so incompetently that it destroys the pacing. The reduction of the two redshirts seems to take a month, while everyone involved moves very slowly and stands very still. Even the paralysis effect—which does not involve technology at all, as it is achieved by the old-fashioned method of telling the actors to ‘freeze’—is ruined by the fact that while everyone else is 100% frozen, Shatner keeps following the Kelvin with his eyes. I don’t know whether Daniels didn’t notice, whether he didn’t dare correct Shatner, whether he did correct Shatner but Shatner couldn’t/wouldn’t stop doing it, or whether they just decided fuck it, it’s lunchtime. There are a lot of basic acting problems in these scenes, ranging from Hot Yeoman 9.0’s unusually wooden delivery—even for a Hot Yeoman—of her three lines to Shatner’s weirdly apathetic reactions to entrances and exits. Evidently Daniels could not be bothered to take ten minutes to block the ‘escape’ from the cave, because the characters get into a log jam by the door and have to back up and wait for each other, so that Spock and McCoy wind up strolling through, Nimoy having forgotten that he’s supposed to be leaning on Kelly for support. It all suggests that the whole thing was done with very little rehearsal, and with very low investment on the part of the director, the producer, the editors, and the actors.   
  
But the script itself is no prize. It’s hard to see how, between the two of them, Jerome Bixby and D. C. Fontana couldn’t come up with something better than this. The title comes from a conversation between Kirk and Kelinda on the planet. She’s picked a lupine, and is reminiscing fondly about how they used to have some crystals that kind of remind her of this in Andromeda too, and asks Kirk what they’re called. Kirk, not being Dennis Moore, tells her they’re “flowers…I don’t know the variety.” Kelinda says that on their planet they call these flower-like crystals something else; and Kirk, in one of the few moments where he seems to become his old scenery-chewing self, crushes the flower in one hand while quoting Shakespeare: “That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet.” I’m not sure exactly how this applies to the main plot of the episode, which could best be summed up as, “Human Bodies: Such A Problem.” Perhaps it’s meant to be a poignant evocation of the spirit of cooperation and peaceful coexistence that Kirk invokes by trying to get the Kelvins to submit all of this to the Federation for mediation: Kelinda’s interest in the flower suggests that there’s enough common ground, despite superficial differences in form, for the Kelvins and humans to share the galaxy.   
  
Perhaps not. The episode is so incoherent that it’s hard to say. As in other Fontana confections such as “Journey to Babel” and “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” a plot is no sooner hatched than it is abandoned for something else. Escape from cave: failed. Building a jamming field for the paralyzer out of McCoy’s medical equipment: as far as I can see, this morphs at some point into a plan to take out out the power source for the paralyzer, which is never attempted because Spock decides it’s impossible. Self-destruct device: never used. Getting an alien drunk, stealing his paralyzer box, and taking it to Kirk so he can use it to reconstitute the crew: Scotty succeeds in getting the alien under the table, but then passes out himself, so: failed. (By the way, I think this is our first real look at Scotty’s quarters; and the set dressers weren’t taking any chances. His décor includes half a suit of armor, a kilt, some antique sword things, bagpipes, and a shield.)  
  
The effect is that it becomes more obvious than usual that Fontana’s objective is not so much to tell a story as to contrive dramatic and/or comic situations in which the characters can do their shtick. Spock gets to be logical; McCoy gets to be irascible; Kirk gets to seduce an alien spacebabe; Scotty gets…drunk. I’m not knocking the shtick; its produces the only decent parts of the episode, such as this immortal exchange:  
  
 **SCOTTY: I found this on Ganym[drunkenmumble].**  
 **TOMAR: What is it?**  
 **SCOTTY: [inspects bottle] It’s green.**   
  
I’m not a fan of drunk humor, but Scotty hasn’t gotten to do a whole lot on this show, and Doohan seems to enjoy it, especially toward the end when he starts talking to his special bottle of scotch. Kirk’s first attempt to hit on Kelinda is also amusing. After—with much difficulty—Kirk introduces her to the concept of kissing, she says, “Ah, you are seducing me.” I figured out what it is that Kelinda reminds me of: she acts much the same way that hot female Russian agents used to act in Bond films, etc. Very cool, very remote, kind of like an animated mannequin. Anyhow, Kelinda doesn’t understand why humans make such heavy weather of “a simple biological function;” Kirk finally says, “Kelinda, I’m sorry I brought the whole thing up,” and retires in disorder. But of course she comes around eventually.  
  
It’s amusing; it’s sort of endearing; but it’s not enough, and it suggests that the team is running out of ideas. For a show where there’s typically very little evidence of continuity, there’s an unusual number of references to other episodes: a direct reference to “A Taste of Armageddon,” an implied reference to “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” a line borrowed from “I, Mudd” (after he kisses her, Kalinda asks Kirk if “there is some significance to this action,” a line that one of the Alices uses to Spock after he touches her neck), a parody of Kirk’s explanation of kissing to Shahna in “Gamesters of Triskelion” (instead of “helping,” kissing becomes “apologizing,” and Kelinda asks Kirk to “apologize to [her] again”), and even a callback to Kirk’s attempt to teach Charlie X about not hitting women:  
  
 **KIRK: I don’t usually go around beating up beautiful women.**  
 **KELINDA: Why not?**  
 **KIRK: Because there are better things for men and women to do with each other.**  
  
There's even a callback to "Shore Leave" when Spock refers to the Vulcan trance thing as a better alternative than "what you humans call 'vacation.'" Really, the fact that Kirk is the only guy in the holding cell who knows about this special Vulcan thing is one of the few neat things about this episode (how does Kirk know this? has he seen it done? have they incorporated it into their erotic play?). But bottom line, either Dorothy Catherine is singlehandedly attempting to create continuity for this series, or she’s just going back to the same well way too often.    
  
Speaking of going back to the well...next up is “The Omega Glory.”


	51. THE OMEGA GLORY

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This episode seems to be dear to the hearts of some Trek fans. So let me warn you: it is on my Worst Ever short list. With, I believe, good reason.
> 
> All the same, it's actually more entertaining in its badness than some of the others--"The Alternative Factor," for instance.

**STARDATE: April 20, 2012**

**THE OMEGA GLORY**  
 **Written by Gene Roddenberry**  
  
You know, in a way, I’ve been looking forward to this one. As I’ve been going through this rewatch the question has often arisen: “Was ‘The Omega Glory’ _really_ the worst Star Trek episode ever? Or is it just that ‘The Omega Glory’ is bad in a more memorable way than some of the other really bad episodes?”  
  
And now I know.  
  
 **The Summary** :  Approaching a planet, Sulu (yay! Sulu’s back! And Chekov is gone! Sadly, not for good!) notes that there is another starship already in orbit. It’s the USS Exeter; and nobody’s answering the phone. Kirk, McCoy, Spock, and a redshirt beam on over, where they discover that the cast has apparently beamed off to a nudist colony somewhere. No, no I’m sorry; what I mean is that their uniforms and boots are draped about, and that there is a quantity of driveway salt scattered amongst them, and nobody can figure it out until McCoy realizes that the crystals contain the minerals that would be left if you completely dehydrated a human body. The surgeon’s log confirms, rather dramatically, that the crew was wiped out by a virus brought back by the landing party. The dying surgeon gaspily informs whoever finds the log that their only hope is to transport to the planet surface. They do so, and discover the following:   
  
1) This planet is inhabited by two ethnically distinct warring tribes, the “Yangs,” who are white, and the “Kohns,” who are Asian. I mean obviously not _Asian_ Asian, I mean there’s no actual continent of Asia on this planet, right, that would be CRAZY! But they look Asian and they all have names like “Wu.”  
  
2) The Kohns appear to be civilized while the Yangs are referred to as “savages.”  
  
3) Captain Tracy of the USS Exeter is alive and well and using his phasers to help the Kohns fight off the Yangs. Clearly this is a violation of the prime directive.  
  
4) According to Tracy, the planet itself somehow immunizes people against the virus—and against everything else. He believes both that they will die if they leave the planet, and that if they could isolate whatever it is that is protecting people on this planet from it and from other diseases and apparently from aging itself, humanity could achieve immortality.   
  
Before Kirk can figure out what to do about Tracy and his Prime Directive violations, Tracy takes the three of them into custody. He tells the Enterprise that the landing party is unconscious; Kirk manages to yell out “SULU!” before he is suppressed; Tracy tries to explain this as delirium, but you gotta figure Sulu is smarter than that. Anyhow, McCoy is put to work under guard trying to isolate the immunizing agent. Kirk, after a couple failed escape attempts, is thrown into a cell next to Spock’s—a cell which contains a Yang and his mate. Both attack Kirk for quite a long time. Kirk fends them off for a while. During a conversation with Spock about the crumbling mortar in the windows Kirk says the word “freedom.” He-Yang is suddenly very interested—and speaks for the first time. Freedom, he says, is one of their “worship words.” Kirk says it’s one of his too. Together Kirk and the male Yang get one of the bars loose; the Yang then clouts Kirk over the head with it, pulls out the other bars, and escapes with his mate. Kirk regains consciousness seven hours later and then liberates Spock.   
  
The two of them bust into McCoy’s laboratory. McCoy has figured out a few things: 1) The plague that killed the Exeter crew behaves much like a germ that we being developed on Earth in the 1990s for use in biological warfare. (You remember the controversy over the Clinton administration’s dedicating $30 million for the Human Dehydration Project. They wound up abandoning it because the Republicans filibustered the bill that would have funded the Human Rehydration Project. And that is why we cannot save on money and jet fuel and carbon pollution by shipping ourselves from place to place at the bulk mail rate.) 2) In the centuries since this agent was deployed, evolution has created balancing agents in the air, soil, and water that counteract the effect of the germ (as in “Miri,” there’s some confusion over whether this thing is a virus or a bacterial infection). Subjects who have been on the planet for a certain length of time develop immunities. McCoy’s take on it is that if the Exeter crew had only hung out for another few hours, they could have beamed back and everything would have been fine. His explanation for why people on this planet don’t get sick and can live to be 1000 is that the only people to survive the original war were exceptionally disease-resistant, hardy individuals with super-strong immune systems, and all the current inhabitants are descendants of these people. Thus, Tracy’s scheme for bottling and selling the elixir of life is totally crackpot.  
  
When Spock attempts to signal the ship, Tracy busts in and phasers him. Spock is down. Kirk and Tracy are duking it out when the Yangs arrive and take the whole bunch of them prisoner. The Yangs have taken the last piece of Kohn territory, and they bring their captives along to their big celebration. While waiting for it to begin, Kirk has an epiphany: ‘Yang’ is a corruption of ‘Yankee.’ Spock observes that ‘Kohn’ might be a corruption of “Communist.” And sure enough, here comes the high priest toting a big ol’ American flag. To which the head Yang, now identified as Chief Cloud William, starts saying a very garbled Pledge of Allegiance, which Kirk finishes for him. Tracy tries to convince the astonished Yangs that Kirk is actually the Evil One. Kirk fails the first test; he can’t for the life of him figure out what the words to the “e plebnista” are. Tracy points out that Spock a) looks like Satan and b) ‘has no heart’ (or rather, as McCoy points out, has his heart in the wrong place). As a last-ditch effort to prevent them from executing Spock, Kirk offers to fight it out with Tracy to prove which is good and which is evil (since the Yang books specify that good always triumphs). While he and Tracy get into a gang-style knife fight, Spock mindwhammies Cloud William’s mate into flipping open a communicator and signaling the Enterprise. By the time Sulu and his redshirts arrive, however, Kirk has already beaten Tracy and nobly refused to kill him. The Yangs, of course, are awed by the magic of the transporter, and allow Kirk to school them in their own ancient traditions by bringing the “e plebnista” out of its sacred box and reading it out loud. The “e plebnista,” of course, is the Constitution of the United States. Kirk et al. get ready to beam up, with Tracy under arrest; but Kirk lingers for one last loving look at the Yangs rediscovering the meaning of freedom and liberty. **The End.**  
  
So. Does “The Omega Glory” really represent the worst Star Trek can bring us?   
  
It’s like this. For the first forty minutes or so, “The Omega Glory” is a decent episode. The discovery of the Exeter and its dehydrated remains is of course a little silly; but it’s also kind of creepy. The conflict with the haggard and hollow-eyed stark raving mad Captain Tracy is dramatic, and gives Kirk the opportunity to mount an unusually robust defense of the Prime Directive. In “The Omega Glory,” Kirk’s voice-over says that upholding the Prime Directive is a “star captain’s” most sacred oath which he swears to honor at the expense of his ship and/or his life, and Kirk is astonished and disgusted to see Tracy violating that oath. McCoy tries to argue extenuating circumstances, but Kirk and honey badger agree there can be no excuse for such a thing. Kirk, of course, has numerous PD violations in his own past; but I suppose from his point of view they can all be justified on technicalities (in “Return of the Archons” the culture is not protected because it’s not ‘growing;’ ditto for “The Apple;” in “A Piece of the Action” the contamination is already ongoing). Or, if one wants to be generous, one might invent one’s own continuity based on the air date order and assume that Kirk has learned from his experience with the “Neurals” in “A Private Little War” and no longer believes that the solution to ethnic conflict is to arm both sides. Besides, in “A Private Little War,” it was the Klingons who started the whole thing anyway. It is perhaps significant to Kirk that Tracy is partly motivated by personal gain. Tracy tries to co-opt Kirk in his elixir of life scheme; Kirk pretends to think about it, but only to distract Tracy into permitting another escape attempt. McCoy gets to do something useful with his medical degree, and his characterization in this episode is right on. Skeptical about any form of idealism, McCoy dismisses Kirk’s attraction to the Yangs as “romantic” and cautions Spock just before the Kirk/Tracy showdown that “evil usually triumphs unless good is very, very careful.” The moment at which McCoy checks out the silent and smiling Kohn woman who has brought him food is a little icky; but compared to what Roddenberry normally does with female characters, that moment plus the half-naked Yang chick who mudwrestles Kirk and literally speaks only once during the entire episode is a small price to pay. Spock’s characterization is somewhat more annoying—he offers several very unhelpful ‘logical’ suggestions to Kirk during his battle against the two Yangs in his cell—and this cell scene is not as suggestive as the one in “Patterns of Force.” But Nimoy does get to do that thing where he responds to racial taunting with a sardonic eyebrow and a world-weary stare, which I love. There’s a little too much fighting for my taste, but the performers carry it off well enough. And Sulu and Uhura get to thwart Tracy’s schemes by being the “well-trained bridge crew” we know they are. (Tracy puts Kirk at phaserpoint and tells him to order them to beam down some phasers; Kirk places the order knowing that Sulu’s going to tell him they can’t do that without verification. First we’ve heard of this but at least the crew gets some props.)  
  
And then Kirk becomes an etymologist. And after that, this episode goes paddling full-tilt up bullshit creek.  
  
I have a kind of a weakness for cheesy allegory. I will admit that. But for something to be an allegory there has to be a meaningful difference between the thing and what it stands for. Kirk’s discovery that “Yang” means “Yankee” collapses that difference. There are many, many problems with that. First of all, it is brain-shatteringly impossible that on an alien planet, prior to any form of contact with humans, a culture would emerge which not only formed an American-style democracy but actually replicated, word for word, the pledge of allegiance and the Constitution while also developing a flag identical to America’s. Spock already told us back in “Patterns of Force” that such an exact parallel development is so improbable as to be put-near impossible.   
  
And the thing is that if what you want is to make your Star Trek episode a social commentary or satire or a cautionary tale about the fragility of American democracy or its deterioration in an increasingly militarized world, _there is absolutely no need to actually set it in America._ Use an alien planet—a REALLY alien planet—and invent alien stuff that allows you to say something about your topic that you wouldn’t be able to say if you had to set it in the real world. That’s what science fiction is for. People will get it. Truly they will. I can’t understand why you would think that in order to get people to see the connections you would have to have one of the Yangs carry in an American flag…unless, Gene, part of your problem is that you assume that all of your viewers are REALLY FUCKING STUPID. Which would actually explain a lot.  
  
There’s only one other reason I can think of, and that is that Gene loved the clichés of American patriotism so much that he had a burning desire to incorporate them into his show. The production certainly lingers over the tattered symbols of American democracy, and over Kirk’s love and reverence for same, with what now strikes me as an almost unbearable smugness. We get blendings of the Star Trek theme and the Star-Spangled Banner in the music. We get swelling violins. We get a shot of a facsimile of the preamble of the Constitution, fancy lettering and all, while Kirk points out how big the first three words (We The People) are—“tall words,” written as if they’ve never been quite so important before. We get Kirk briefly acknowledging the emergence of democracy in other countries and planets but still exalting the Constitution as exceptional and unique. We get Kirk not only reading the preamble out loud in his best scenery-chewing style, but seizing it and distributing its contents to the masses because it was “never meant for chiefs.” We get…oh, why go on.  
  
But you know what, that’s not the worst of it. There’s a lot of other pukeworthy that I’d totally forgotten, or perhaps never paid attention to.  
  
After he has his epiphany about the Yangs, Kirk hypothesizes that if his ancestors had been “driven into the hills” after being dispossessed by the Kohns, they would have to start living like Native Americans—I’m sorry, Indians—and would, he says, eventually _become_ Indians. And sure enough, it’s after this conversation that Cloud William walks in to the accompaniment of a tom-tom, identifies himself by name and as a chief and son of chiefs, and generally Indians it up one side and down the other. So this is what those last ten minutes are really about. Gene watched too many Westerns as a kid, and all his life he’s been thinking, how sad it is that the white guys don’t get to do any of that cool Indian stuff. And now, he’s figured out a way to sleaze the white guys into the Native American role and appropriate both the whole ‘noble savage’ thing and the Native Americans’ spiritual connection to the land. White men are thus now indigenous, the land is rightfully and intrinsically theirs, and the whole history of European colonization that led up to the establishment of the United States of America—and which must have happened here as well as at home, or else the existence of the Constitution, the term “Yankee,” and the color scheme of the flag make no fucking sense—is erased.   
  
What do you mean white guys? you may be asking. Are all of these alternate-universe Americans white? How can you be sure?  
  
Here’s how I can be sure: whilst in the cells, Spock and Kirk discuss the fact that the evidence of a previous civilization that has now deteriorated suggests that there was at one point a truly hideous war. Kirk, agreeing with Spock’s theory, muses that “The yellow civilization is almost destroyed; the white civilization _is_ destroyed.”  
  
I’ll cite that again. And believe me, it’s verbatim:  
  
 **KIRK: The yellow civilization is almost destroyed; the white civilization _is_ destroyed.**  
  
Yellow, huh.  
  
The “Kohns” are ‘yellow.’  
  
No wonder Takei had his hands full keeping people from shoving Samurai swords into Sulu’s hands. COME ON, PEOPLE! I know it’s 1968, but WHAT the FUCK!  
  
All of this, incidentally, completely undermines Kirk’s gracious willingness to include the Kohns in the definition of “we the people” to whom the Constitution’s words are addressed. The Kohns were not created equal, and freedom and liberty can be extended to them only after they have been conquered. Remember that this all happens during a ceremony intended to mark the final defeat of the Kohns and the capture of the last of their “places.” Cloud William kicks things off by intoning, “What was once ours is ours again.”   
  
Oh, there are other things you could bitch about. The fact that the pledge of allegiance, a piece of claptrap foisted on schoolchildren by 20th century ideologues, is not only given almost equal status to the Constitution but is apparently much more familiar to Kirk than the preamble is. The fact that the book of “Yang legends” in which Cloud William finds the picture of the devil that looks just like Spock appears to be a Bible. The Yangs’ fusion of religion and secular democracy is, I think, supposed to be a Bad Thing; nevertheless, I guess in the alternate-universe future, not only will all Americans be white, but they will also be Christian.  
  
But I weary of this. It is just so sad that Roddenberry ruined what might have been a decent episode by turning it into this gruesome cocktail of American exceptionalism, racism, and the cheapest kind of patriotism. Like we invented democracy. Like it’s our God-given vocation to bring it to everyone else--after conquering them first. Like in the entire universe there has never been a society capable of coming up with a better expression of democratic principles than the Constitution of the United States. Like…ah fuck it, I don’t have time.  
  
So is it the worst ever? Or, at least, the worst so far?  
  
Despite the horrifying nature of the abovementioned last ten minutes, I would say no. “The Omega Glory” is reasonably compelling for about 35 minutes, and it would probably be a decent mid-range episode if only, if only, Gene had not succumbed to his idiotic fantasies at the last minute. I would thus say that “The Omega Glory” beats “The Alternative Factor,” which is never compelling for a moment, and “The Apple,” which is wall-to-wall stupid in addition to getting the characters woefully wrong. I would not say that it beats “A Private Little War,” which is bad throughout but which does not contain a single giant black hole of badness comparable to the end of “Omega Glory.”   
  
Next up:…“The Ultimate Computer,” an episode about which I remember nothing.


	52. THE ULTIMATE COMPUTER

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another omnipotent computer episode, but better than most and with some nice inside-joke touches from D. C. Fontana, who is either getting better at writing her own scripts or getting better at preventing Gene Roddenberry et al. from fucking them up.

**STARDATE: April 25, 2012**

**THE ULTIMATE COMPUTER**  
 **By D. C. Fontana from a story by Laurence N. Wolfe**  
  
I was wrong; I do remember this one. I just didn’t associate it with this title. So goddamn many computer episodes. But this one was stronger than I had expected.  
  
 **The Summary:** A pissed-off Kirk is ordered back to a space station where he is informed by Commodore Wesley that the Enterprise has been selected as the vehicle for a field test of the M5 computer system, a breakthrough in computer science designed by the brilliant Dr. Richard Daystrom. All but 20 of the crew are to beam down to a holding area while Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scottie, Chekov (he’s essential personnel? please) Sulu (hooray!), Uhura, Dr. Daystrom, and 13 other people stay on board to help the M5 run the series of tests they have set up for it, including a big mock battle that will pit the M5-run Enterprise against 4 Federation starships. Already a little leery of this whole idea, Kirk and McCoy are further exasperated on their first meeting with Daystrom, who is arrogant, condescending, and wholly dismissive of their concerns. The M5 is plugged in and turned on and it runs through the first couple tests with no trouble. M5 emerges as the winner in a surprise ‘attack’ carried out by Wesley’s ship (the Lexington). Wesley, who for no reason I can understand seems really psyched about replacing starship captains and crews with computers, ironically congratulates “Captain Dunsil.” Only after a stricken Kirk has stalked silently off the bridge does Spock inform McCoy that a “dunsil” is Starfleet slang for “a piece of equipment that serves no useful purpose.”  
  
Down in Kirk’s quarters, McCoy brings him a couple cocktails, I guess figuring that now that Kirk has been rendered obsolete he can at least go ahead and get hammered. But Uhura reports that there’s a vessel in view. It’s an ore freighter. Kirk wants to give it a wide berth. But despite all attempts to disengage M5, it remains in control of the helm, and blasts the fuck out of the ore freighter. Kirk, now seriously alarmed, prevails upon Daystrom to help them shut M5 off; but by now M5 has protected itself with a forcefield. When one of Scotty’s guys tries to disconnect it from the power source, M5 fries him with a nasty energy beam. Spock and Scotty try to get control through some back-channel route known only to them, but it doesn’t work.   
  
As Kirk et al. anticipate, it’s during the war games that the shit hits the fan. M5 has control over communications, weapons, the whole ball of wax; so Kirk can’t do anything about the fact that M5 has armed phasers to full power and is trying to destroy all 4 ‘enemy’ starships. It totally destroys the Excalibur and seriously damages the Lexington. Daystrom tries to talk M5 into stopping, explaining to it that murder is wrong; but instead he winds up talking himself into a nervous breakdown. Spock eventually nerve-pinches him; Daystrom’s hauled off to sickbay (apparently everyone’s forgotten that M5 shut off power to sickbay hours earlier). Who can we turn to now that Daystrom is doolally? Who can convince the M5 to destroy itself? Is there ANYONE ON BOARD who has ANY experience in this kind of situation?  
  
Oh! That’s right! Kirk has a black frickin’ belt in _bullshitsu!_  
  
In short order Kirk has convinced the M5 to commit suicide. Sadly, the method the M5 chooses involves leaving the Enterprise defenseless and open to an attack that Starfleet Command has just authorized Wesley to carry out against the Enterprise. After a moving speech to the entire crew about how they will be sacrificing their 19 lives to save those on the other starships, Kirk decides not to raise the shields even though they now have the capacity to do so. Wesley decides not to attack. Presumably, then, communications come back online and the whole mess can be straightened out.  
  
So, Daystrom’s sedated and restrained in sickbay, and Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are in the elevator, and having a great time bantering about humans and computers and whatnot and not at all bothered by the fact that their beloved Enterprise destroyed an entire fucking Federation starship just moments earlier. **The End.**  
  
This episode really suffers from its position in the lineup. I would have been a lot more impressed by it if I hadn’t already seen “Return of the Archons” and “The Changeling” and “I, Mudd” and…well, the point is that all of us know exactly how this plot works. Oh, look, the superpowerful computer that nobody seems to know how to operate has decided not to obey its human masters and to look out for number one. Hey Dorothy, who was that on the phone? What? You say it’s Stanley Kubrick’s lawyer with a cease and desist order?

Actually, that is totally unfair. This episode aired March 8, 1968, and _2001: A Space Odyssey_ wasn’t released until April 1968. Fontana and Wolfe’s use of the same plot thus represents not plagiarism but the fact that the “supercomputer running amok” story line was pervading the breeze in 1968. In most ways it’s just a variation on the old _Frankenstein_ plot: you create something intelligent cause you think that’s cool, until you discover it won’t listen to you. Actually, one might say this is the plot of all parenting narratives, real or fictional, except for the part where the father builds the thing from scratch without any help from anyone with a womb.   
  
“The Ultimate Computer” brings the _Frankenstein_ craziness very effectively via its characterization of Dr. Daystrom. It becomes clear as things go from bad to worse that Daystrom is way too invested in the M5. He’s protective of it, highly sensitive to criticism of it, and poorly differentiated from it; at several key moments he starts using “we” when he should be saying “it.” Come to find out, the M5 is as advanced as it is because Daystrom endowed it with the ability to think for itself by giving it “human engrams”—I have no idea what an engram is, apart from something Scientologists believe in—and making it operate like a human brain. Asked whose engrams he used, Daystrom replies, “My own, of course.” Like Frankenstein, Daystrom conceives of his creature as a child, but also as an extension of himself and as a validation of his own genius; and this is of course why he becomes unglued when Junior goes on a killing spree. McCoy has already informed us, I mean informed Kirk, that after his major breakthrough in “duotronics” (which are what run the Enterprise computers) in his 20s Daystrom had a long dry spell. During his final monologue to M5, Daystrom rants with terrible and bitter fragility about those years of watching other people get fame and money building on his work while he remained stuck.   
  
The script is not prize-winning, but it is enormously helped out by William Marshall’s performance as Daystrom. Marshall is African-American and about six feet tall with a striking face and a lean narrow body just humming with unexpressed tension. Nobody, of course, remarks upon the fact that the most brilliant computer scientist of the future is Black; in the future we will be above noticing such things. But it was surely a surprise to the original viewers in 1968, and his introduction seems to be edited to maximize that. It’s another little victory in the struggle, though it is a shame that this brilliant Black professional of the future also winds up going STARK RAVING MAD.  
  
More important for the 21st century viewer is the fact that Marshall elevates the whole episode. About three sentences into his first speech I said to myself, “I bet this guy has played Othello.” And in fact, his IMDB biography says he played Othello in at least 8 different productions in addition to doing a lot of other work in Shakespeare and on Broadway. One of them was filmed in 1981, so I may even have seen him do it. At any rate, the Method training (IMDB tells me he studied with Sanford Meisner, and also had the honor of being one of the names named during the McCarthy hearings) and the Shakespearean experience pay off. Not only does Marshall’s Shakespearean delivery instantly convey that he holds himself above the petty mortal plane in which the rest of the officers operate, in Marshall we have that rare actor who in addition to being able to do subtlety is also not afraid to go bigger, bolder, and weirder than even La Shatner. Makes you wish they’d had more scenes together. The physical stuff is awkward—Marshall’s so much taller than Shatner that when Kirk is ‘restraining’ him he looks kind of like a small child grabbing onto his dad’s torso—but Marshall’s got that je ne sais WTF, and this whole plot runs on his electricity. I was torn between thinking, “He’s too good for this shit,” and “This is what science fiction is all about: giving actors like Marshall some interesting work in a show where, because it’s not set in the real world, nobody can complain that no Black person would realistically have that job or whine, ‘but he doesn’t sound Black’!”  
  
Fontana’s plotting is better (finally! a coherent linear plot!) and she handles the Kirk/Spock/McCoy triad more deftly than usual. Around McCoy, Spock deliberately yanks his chain by being all about computers and their efficiency; but in his scenes with Kirk Spock makes it clear that “computers make highly efficient servants” but that he has “no desire to serve under one.” His speech about how a starship runs on “loyalty to one man” (would that be That Man On The Bridge?) is touching but, given the context, illogical; the whole point of the M5 is that it’s capable of totally automating the starship so that there will be no crew and thus no need for loyalty. Spock is the first to figure out that the M5 is reacting like a human and not like a computer; but it’s McCoy who figures out that Daystrom thinks of it as a child (though frankly Daystrom’s dialogue makes that so clear even Chekov could pick it up). Spock explaining Wesley’s “Captain Dunsil” crack to McCoy is an extra bonus. (Nice reactions all round on that one from the bridge crew, by the way. I note also that I find Chekov a lot less annoying when he’s next to Sulu.) The other officers are so horrified they won’t even talk about it; Spock is less openly horrified but he is pained on Kirk’s behalf and even, maybe, a little reluctant to hurt McCoy by revealing just how badly their best friend has just been dissed. My other favorite Spock moment comes during the war games disaster, as Spock says in his deadpan but secretly distressed way, “Wesley is a fine commander. I would regret serving aboard the instrument of his death.”  
  
The _bullshitsu_ is unremarkable except in that it forces Daystrom to reveal what seems to have been something of a secret agenda for the M5: by eliminating the need for men to run starships, the M5 will make space exploration something that no longer takes a toll on human life. The fact that war games are such an important part of this program suggests that Daystrom’s ultimate agenda may be no less than the end of war—or at least the end of human beings dying in it. Kirk, of course, doesn’t go for this—M5, he says, is taking away all the things that “make men men”—and it’s possible that M5 was given this objective purely in order to set up the _bullshitsu_. Still, it’s interesting that Daystrom’s goal appears to have been to make not just Kirk but the military itself obsolete.  
  
All of this technology-as-job-thief stuff is not that original, nor is it that interesting. It’s probably less interesting now than it was in 1968. It’s not that technological advances don’t lead to job losses any more—they do—but that the very fact that we’ve seen all these revolutions in computer technology has pulled the plug on the fear that drives this episode, which is that computers will develop the capacity for independent and creative thought. Your smartphone may talk back to you but that doesn’t stop you from realizing that it’s a machine. We are comfortable enough with computers that we no longer attribute malice to them—except, you know, when they crash. Plus, anyone who has tangled with a  MicroSoft product is over the idea that computers will ever be infallible.  
  
The war games part of the episode was the most effective for me. I was much impressed by the film _War Games_ back in the 1980s. That film is an updated version of this plot: after discovering that, in a simulated nuclear war scenario, a significant proportion of human soldiers will refuse to launch the missiles when ordered to, the Army decides to put the whole shooting match under the control of a big ol’ computer named WOPR. The brilliant young slacker/hacker played by Matthew Broderick hacks into WOPR and creates havoc before resolving it. Here, the _bullshitsu_ plays not on the computer’s directive to protect human life but on what Spock would identify as its logical nature: our sl/hacker directs WOPR to play Tic-Tac-Toe. After discovering that it always ends in a tie, WOPR makes an analogy to the ‘game’ of “Global Thermonuclear War,” running through all the possible scenarios and discovering that they all end in stalemate (or as we would call it global nuclear devastation). That finally gets it to call off the game.   
  
Anyway, my point is that the major drama generator in _War Games_ is the fact that WOPR is threatening to launch missiles without having been ordered to do so, and that because of the whole Cold War thing it’s very difficult to get the US side in communication with the Russians to let them know what’s going on. Same thing happens in “The Ultimate Computer”: not only is M5 preparing to blow away 4 starships full of people but it won’t even let Kirk call over to warn them. Instead, Kirk has to sit on the bridge watching Wesley tell him the casualty count and beg him to call off the attack. It’s a novel situation with a lot of dramatic possibilities and the cast handles it well. Kirk looks like he’s about to explode from the fumes generated by the potent cocktail of anger, grief, remorse, and frustration simmering inside him, and all the other officers are freaked out in their own ways.   
  
And since I have harshed on Fontana in the past, let me say how much I appreciate the meta aspects of this episode. Daystrom, when introduced to the inimitably irascible and computer-hating McCoy, asks who this crazy man is; when told he’s the ship’s surgeon, Daystrom hints that his presence at this top-secret event is inappropriate. When M5 goes into orbit around a new planet, Kirk orders up a standard “general survey” landing party consisting of himself, Bones, and a few other scientists. M5’s recommendations for the landing party leave Kirk and McCoy out; asked why, it replies that they are “nonessential personnel.” In other words, Fontana uses Daystrom and M5 to acknowledge the “illogical” aspects of the show’s typical plotting. M5 is right; there’s absolutely no fucking reason for the captain of the starship to go down to every damn planet with every damn landing party, and of course it’s even harder to justify the way McCoy, as a guy whose job is supposed to be limited to healing the sick, winds up playing almost as important a role amongst the officers as Spock does. Nevertheless, these things are necessary for us, the irrational viewers, who care a lot more about the characters than we do about what makes sense. Just as the Enterprise runs on loyalty to one man, _Star Trek_ runs on loyalty to three men; and Dorothy’s right to call us on our bitching about the gratuitous endangerment of the ship’s senior officers. Hey, this episode seems to be saying, you want logic, or you want good TV? Yeah, that’s what I thought. We're not lettin' any fucking computer pick the landing party.  
  
So, all in all, some pleasant surprises from an unlikely source. Next up: Bread and Circuses!


	53. BREAD AND CIRCUSES

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is another Ralph Senensky episode; and anyone who is interested in the question of whether K/S is canon should read his [post about it](http://senensky.com/bread-and-circuses/) after you read the review. Senensky singles out what I consider the slashtasticest part of this episode as something special that he's proud of. He doesn't explain exactly why. It would no doubt anger him to be told that it's because it's totally slashtastic. But he does testify that he was consciously trying to do something different with this bit of McCoy/Spock sparring; and he does certainly succeed in heightening its emotional impact. So the intensity we see through our slash goggles was actually intentionally put there, though how we read it is, of course, our own responsibility.

**STARDATE: May 3, 2012**

**BREAD AND CIRCUSES**  
 **Written by Gene Roddenberry and Gene L. Coon**  
  
This must have been the one that broke up the Gene Team.   
  
**The Summary:** The Enterprise has found the debris of what was once a survey vessel called the S.S. Beagle, which disappeared six years earlier. The debris doesn’t contain any human remains so they figure the crew must have beamed down to this planet that’s in the area and which looks _sooooooo_ much like Earth it’s really kind of uncanny. It even has technology much like that of Earth in 1968. Uhura picks up some old-fangled “video” transmissions from this planet. What shows up, in black and white, is a news show which informs everyone that a) there’s slavery on this planet b) there’s gladiators on this planet and c) the “last of the barbarians” who gets killed in one of these combats is a guy whose name was on the S. S. Beagle’s roster.  
  
Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to find out what happened to the rest of the Beagle’s crew. They are soon accosted by a guy with huge biceps and very small shorts. Flavius, for that is his name, is an escaped slave and former gladiator who has become a “sun” worshipper. After some persuasion by his older friend Septimus, Flavius takes our heroes to a special hideout for runaway slaves who have become pacifists and brothers of “the sun.” It is confirmed that this planet is in fact, essentially, “a twentieth-century Rome” where—just like on Earth!—the Romans all speak English. Kirk explains they’re looking for their friends, including Captain Merrick.   
  
Turns out that “Mericus,” as he is now known, is the “First Citizen,” who is either the right hand man of Proconsul Claudius Marcus or the guy Claudius Marcus is the right-hand man of; it’s hard to be sure. Either way, Kirk convinces Flavius to take the three of them into the city to find Merrick. Well, they get taken prisoner and locked into a cell together. Flavius, an ex-gladiator of some reknown, is forcibly re-upped by the goons. Merrick, now wearing a totally ridiculous outfit, and the Proconsul Claudius, show up with more goons and take Kirk, Spock and McCoy for a little chat.  
  
The Proconsul takes a dim view of the “contamination” of outside ideas like freedom and whatnot. Therefore his policy on Starfleet vessels that show up within his jurisdiction is to make them bring down the crew and force them to assimilate or die. Merrick brought his crew of 47 down; some adapted, and some got gladiated to death. Merrick and Claudius try to force Kirk to bring his crew down so they can be put through the same process. At gunpoint, Kirk does call up to Scotty, but instead of giving the expected order says “Condition green,” which is code for “we’re kind of in a jam down here, but don’t do anything drastic.” The three of them are hauled off to be “prepared for the games.”  
  
Kirk is brought into the stands with Merrick and Claudius to watch a gladiatorial contest which pits Spock and McCoy against Flavius and a guy named Achilles. Spock takes on Achilles, while Flavius tries to avoid killing McCoy. When Flavius can no longer avoid it, Spock neutralizes Achilles and neck-pinches Flavius. Claudius orders Spock and McCoy taken back to the cell, and sentences Kirk to be taken from this place and brought round to his place. Seriously, Claudius puts Kirk in his quarters and sends in his prime slave girl Drusilla to cater to his every whim. While Spock and McCoy have an impeding-death-induced heart-to-heart down in the dank dungeon, Kirk gets it on with Drusilla. Claudius shows up and explains that he wanted Kirk to have a last night ‘as a man’ before he gets slaughtered. Just as Kirk is about to be executed on live TV, Flavius busts in and fights the executioner. He is machine-gunned; but Scotty engineers a blackout at the critical moment, allowing Kirk to escape and bust Spock and McCoy out of the cell. Merrick and Claudius, of course, trap them in the same damn corridor; while they swordfight it out with the guards, Merrick uses Kirk’s communicator to call the Enterprise. Claudius stabs Merrick in the back; the dying Merrick tosses the communicator into the cell so Scotty can beam them all back aboard.  
  
Back on the Enterprise, Kirk commends Scotty for saving their asses without violating the Prime Directive. A conversation about this puzzling “sun” worship draws a clarification for Uhura, who’s been whiling away her time listening to the planet’s radio programs. She has finally figured out that “it’s not the sun up in the sky…it’s the Son of God.” Kirk muses about how awesome it would be to stick around and “see it happen all over again.” But he tells Chekov to take them out of orbit anyway. **The End.**  
  
You can really tell both Genes were in on this one. There are a lot of really interesting moments…all wrapped up in a big shit envelope.  
  
During a voiceover Kirk calls the new Rome a “striking example of Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planetary Development.” This law is brand new, so let me go over the basic stipulations:  
  
HODGKIN’S LAW OF PARALLEL PLANETARY DEVELOPMENT  
  
1) It is wildly improbable that two unrelated planets in far-flung solar systems would evolve identical cultures, no matter how similar they might be geologically.  
  
2) Nevertheless, as the show’s production budget dwindles, the probability of two unrelated planets in far-flung solar systems evolving identical cultures increases dramatically.  
  
3) As Gene Roddenberry’s involvement in an episode increases, the probability of parallel planetary development approaches 1.  
  
4) The first time your cast encounters an alternate-universe Earth can be swept under the rug as a juvenile mistake. The second and third times it can be explained as cultural contamination. The fourth time can be sold as a cheesy allegory. But when it’s happening for the FIFTH FUCKING TIME, you better trot out some bullshit scientific-sounding ‘explanation’.  
  
But you know what—of all the AU Earth episodes, this one is the most fucked up, premise-wise. First of all, there’s the language thing:  
  
 **SPOCK: Complete Earth parallel. The language here is English.**  
  
Do the Genes know that not everyone on Earth speaks English? Do they know that the Romans did not, in fact, speak English, except in Hollywood sword and sandals epics? I mean, do these people even know where English came from or why Americans speak it? How, under the eternal Pax Romana, are these people supposed to have engaged in the crazy series of historical events that enabled the creation of such an improbably chaotic thing as “colloquial English”? Since Rome is the undisputed ruler of this planet now, why isn't everyone speaking Latin? Or Italian? And even suppose somehow Latin managed to mutate into 20th century colloquial English--a philologically impossible event in the absence of the string of invasions, conquerings, and reconquerings that created the English langauge--why do they all still have Latin names?  
  
But this is a minor irritation compared to the son/sun thing. Clearly the idea is that Flavius and Septimus and their friends were like the early Christians persecuted by the Roman Empire who had to meet in the catacombs and get fed to lions in the arena. And although Kirk remains confused about the nature of this religion longer than you’d think he would, it is made abundantly clear throughout the episode that Christianity is the One True Religion, regardless of this BS McCoy says about them representing many faiths. Uhura prefaces the Big Reveal by saying that she was listening to a show that was “trying” to mock the son-worshippers but “couldn’t”—because of course Christianity is the truth and therefore cannot be mocked. When she finally explains it, everyone on the bridge (minus Spock) is swept by the same rapture that overtakes Kirk as he starts talking about “Caesar and Christ.” Even Chekov. Hey! Soviet boy! What are YOU smiling for? Does the phrase “godless Communism” ring a bell?  
  
Here’s the problem. Well, one of the problems.  
  
During their big debate with Merrick and Claudius over the merits of the 20th century Roman civilization, it is established that they have had no wars in 400 years. Spock enumerates the toll that Earth’s “three world wars” have taken in that time (WWIII, by the way, will kill 37 million people). This is supposed to be a selling point for neo-Rome: sure it’s undemocratic, but it’s peaceful.  
  
And then Christianity, this “philosophy of total love” and peace, is introduced to this society. And everyone on the bridge is so psyched about it. And they have totally forgotten that this “philosophy of total love” has been around on Earth for two and a half millennia and utterly failed to prevent those three world wars Spock was complaining about.   
  
So, yeah, the premise, it sucks. And that’s before you find out that one of the shots of the buildings on this planet shows the inscription “HONNEUR ET PATRIE.” Presumably whoever dug that out of the bin containing all the stock footage of neoclassical European architecture couldn’t tell the difference between French and Latin, and didn’t remember that in this universe they’re all supposed to be speaking English anyway.  
  
You know what, though, there is good stuff buried in here. From a 21st century perspective one of the more interesting things about this episode is its commentary on 1960s era television. I know, I know, another Star Trek episode about TV. I know. Still, it’s instructive how easy it is to imagine a show like “Name the Winner” (the show for which Spock and McCoy wind up having to fight) taking its place in today’s reality TV lineup; and of course the runaway success of _The Hunger Games_ shows that gladiators remain glamorous. Flavius, as he tries not to kill McCoy, gets a lash from the whip of a centurion standing by, who shouts, “If you drive our ratings down, Flavius, I’m going to do a special on you.” A better symbol of the relationship between the producer and the writer could not be constructed.   
  
Really, the analogy between American decadence and Roman decadence that is being beaten into us with the sledgehammer here has only gotten more persuasive in the intervening decades. The only thing that places this episode in 1968, apart from the technology, is how intense and earnest everyone is about TV. Claudius tells Kirk that they’ve given him 15 minutes in “full color” for his execution, and that they have assured him a huge viewing audience; and it seems like he really expects this to matter to Kirk. Then he catches himself: “Of course you wouldn’t understand, since you’re centuries beyond anything as crude as television.” Kirk replies, “I’ve heard it was…similar.”  
  
The treatment of the Prime Directive is, as one might expect from the combination of what Darth Julie has designated the pro-meddling Coon and the anti-meddling Roddenberry, somewhat conflicted. Before they come across Flavius, Kirk goes over the rules: no identification of themselves or hteir mission, no references to space or to the fact that there are other worlds more advanced than theirs, no interference with the culture, no use of advanced technology, etc. Claudius taunts Kirk about the fact that the Prime Directive makes it impossible for him to just use the Enterprise to torch the planet and extort their freedom. Scotty is lauded for coming up with a non-interventionist way of getting Kirk, Spock, and McCoy the hell out of there. At the same time, when Flavius challenges their story about who they are and claims they’re Roman spies, what’s the first thing Kirk does? Whip out his communicator, call the Enterprise, and ask Scotty to prove to them that the ship can count the number of people in the vicinity. In what sense is all this consistent with this iteration of the Prime Directive?  
  
Here’s something which is so weird I can’t tell whether it’s a critique from the right or the left: When Kirk asks Flavius why there aren’t more rebellions, Flavius explains that there used to be some long ago, but they declined once the Empire started giving the slaves benefits—and specifically mentions socialized medicine and social security. I mean not by name, but that’s clearly what’s being referenced. This made the slaves less interested in revolting and more reconciled to their lot.   
  
Oooooo-k…  
  
But the real gem buried in this dreck is what Coon (I’m assuming it’s Coon’s contribution, since it’s good) does with Spock and McCoy. I would especially like to commend what the director, Ralph Senensky, does with that part of the script. It feels as if Coon was looking ahead to the show being canceled and figured, I better wrap up this whole frenemy thing in case I never get another chance.  Spock gets in some of his best zingers yet in this episode. After McCoy informs him that doctors are trained in logic, Spock replies, “I had no idea you were trained.” Flavius asks Kirk, “Are they enemies?” Kirk says, “I don’t know if they know.” McCoy’s attempts to cope as a gladiator are pretty funny (FLAVIUS: At least defend yourself! MCCOY: I _am_ defending myself!), as is the exchange in which Spock asks McCoy if he needs help, and McCoy rants for five minutes about what an idiotic question that is while Flavius wipes the floor with him.   
  
But it’s not until Spock and McCoy are in a cell alone together that things get REALLY interesting.   
  
I quote their exchange at some length:  
  
 **MCCOY: Spock, I…I know we’ve had our disagreements. Maybe they’re jokes; I dunno. As Jim says, we’re not often sure ourselves sometimes. But what I’m trying to say is…**  
SPOCK: Doctor, I am seeking a means of escape. Will you please be brief.  
MCCOY: Well, what I’m trying to say is, you saved my life in the arena.  
SPOCK: Yes, that’s quite true.  
MCCOY: I’m trying to thank you, you pointed-eared hobgoblin!   
SPOCK: Oh, yes, you humans have that emotional need to express gratitude. “You’re welcome,” I believe, is the correct response. However, doctor, you must remember that I am entirely motivated by logic. The loss of our ship’s surgeon, whatever I may think of his relative skill, would mean a reduction in the efficiency of the Enterprise—  
MCCOY: I know why you’re not afraid to die, Spock. You’re more afraid of living. Each day you stay alive is just one more day you might slip and let your human half peek out. That’s it, isn’t it? Insecurity. Why, you wouldn’t know what to do with a genuine warm, decent feeling.  
SPOCK: Really, doctor?  
MCCOY: I know. I’m worried about Jim too.  
  
All right, you read the words and it doesn’t sound that awesome. BUT. Let me just tell you a couple things about the way Ralph Senensky blocked this.  
  
Spock has, throughout the scene, been going around the cell trying to find a weakness in the bars. He’s kneeling down in the corner trying the lower part of the bars when McCoy crouches down and zooms in during Spock’s “motivated by logic” speech. On “I know why you’re not afraid to die,” McCoy grabs Spock’s shoulder, turns him around, pushes him back up against the stone wall, and delivers the rest of that line from well inside Spock’s personal space. When McCoy says Spock “wouldn’t know what to do with a genuine warm, decent feeling,” Spock, who has been facing out through the cell bars, turns his head; and when the camera pans to include McCoy, you see that their heads are so close together they’re almost touching. Spock’s “Really, Doctor?” is not a question; it’s almost a confession. From the tone of his voice and the way he looks at McCoy, one gets the strong impression that “Really, Doctor?” is Vulcan for, “Hey. Dumbass. I have genuine warm decent feelings FOR YOU.” And then McCoy says he’s “worried about Jim too.” And the camera slides over from McCoy’s face to the still-within-kissing-range profile of Spock, who slowly turns his head toward the camera, looking out through the cell bars with an expression I can only describe as profound disappointment. A disappointment tragically heightened for the viewer, I might add, by our knowledge that not only is McCoy totally oblivious to Spock’s emotions at this moment, but That Man On The Bridge is also up in Claudius’s quarters banging a hot neo-Roman slave girl.  
  
You know I could never see Spock/McCoy. But damned if Senensky didn’t make it happen. I dunno, you put two of these guys in a cell together and you don’t know WHAT might happen before they come out.  
  
But of course that is a primary feature of the ‘Roman’ setting. It’s always been true: once you move a story to ancient Rome, that homoerotic ‘subtext’ grows itself pectorals and biceps and six-pack abs and it fights its naked, hairy, olive-oiled way to the surface to become text. Apart from that cell scene, the most obvious example is the episode’s treatment of Claudius and Merrick. Merrick flunked out of Starfleet Academy because of a “split-second of indecision” on a psychological test. As we know from “The Enemy Within,” being ‘decisive’ is essential to command and is directly hooked into a guy’s essential masculinity. Merrick’s masculinity is thus suspect and inadequate from the beginning; and Claudius is pretty handsy with Merrick, touching him as if he kind of owns him. It would be in keeping with the Roman way of doing these things for Claudius to use Merrick as his barbarian boy toy and then treat him with utter contempt in public. Claudius is powerfully attracted to Kirk’s manly defiance; and when Claudius resolves the question of what to do with the barbarians after their failed gladiatorial conquest by pointing at Kirk and saying “Take him to my quarters,” well, what are we to think? I know what I think: if it hadn’t been 1968, maybe Claudius wouldn’t have had to use Drusilla as his proxy. Just in case Merrick didn’t feel dissed enough by Claudius’s infatuation with his new barbarian, Claudius sends Merrick out of the room before explaining the Drusilla thing to Kirk: "Because you are a man...Would you leave us, Mericus? The thoughts of one man to another can have very little interest to you."  
  
(Yeah. I guess I should say something about the whole thing about how screwing a female slave is what makes you a “man.” This is one of the few episodes in which it is made as clear as you could make it on network TV that Kirk actually does the deed with her. He is very suspicious, and keeps expecting Drusilla to be part of some diabolical plot involving torture; but she calms him down, and as they fall into bed there is some cringeworthy byplay about how she wants him to let him know if anything she’s doing causes him pain and he says she’ll be the first to know. And then when Spock and McCoy meet up with him and ask Kirk what they did to him, Kirk says, "They threw me a few curves." Get it? Curves? SO FUNNY! But, you know, we know this is pukeworthy, and probably evidence of the Hand of Roddenberry. So I will say only this: Drusilla is no Shahna, even though she’s just as reflectively and selectively clothed.)  
  
Anyway. For the work done on Spock and McCoy alone, I would say this episode should be spared the iniquity I normally reserve for the crappy AU-Earth plots that make no sense. Kirk has some nice moments too, particularly his response to Claudius’s attempts to make the gladiatorial games scarier to him: “In other parts of the galaxy I’ve seen forms of entertainment that would make this look like a folk dance.” And of course Scotty and Uhura both get some things to do. So it’s not all bad. But…for CHRIST’S SAKE! No more cheesy Christian allegories! No more planets that are exactly like Earth except for maybe one thing. NO MORE!  
  
Up next: "Assignment: Earth." Bleagh. It’s only gonna go downhill from here.


	54. ASSIGNMENT: EARTH

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Season 2 ender, and really in some ways Star Trek's third pilot. Hedging his bets, Gene tried to use what might easily have been the very last episode of Star Trek to create a pilot for a new show called Assignment: Earth. Thank God for the fan campaign, because as uneven as it is, Season 3 of Star Trek is so much better than any season of Assignment: Earth was ever going to be.

**STARDATE: May 7, 2012**

**ASSIGNMENT: EARTH**  
 **By Art Wallace and Gene Roddenberry**  
  
In which Gene Roddenberry conclusively proves that he can create a TV show that even at its best would be far worse than _Star Trek_ at its worst.  
  
 **The Summary:** Faced with the increasing possibility that _Star Trek_ will be canceled after its second season, Gene Roddenberry hatches a cunning plot: he teams up with the guy who wrote “Obsession” to create a pilot for his next show and get the network executives to pay for it by disguising it as an episode of _Star Trek_. The pilot is never picked up, and so humanity is spared the horror that would have been _Assignment:Earth_ , the series. The End.  
  
Oh. You want to know about the plot of the _episode_.  
  
Well, it’s like this. On a whim, basically, the Enterprise has decided to deliberately go back in time and orbit Earth in 1968. Kirk’s voiceover _says_ it’s because they’re studying Earth history to find out how the hell humanity survived the powder keg that was 1968; but come on, that’s bullshit. After the mess the Enterprise made the _last_ time they wound up orbiting earth in the late 1960s—that would be “Tomorrow is Yesterday”—I don’t think Starfleet Command is about to license this kind of temporal tourism—and even if they did, wouldn’t you think they’d send, like, a _historian_ back with them? Or that at least one of the surprisingly large number of historians on board might be given a role in this expedition? Although of course returning to their own time practically destroyed the Enterprise back in “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” so you’d think Starfleet wouldn’t be enthusiastic about doing it again, especially so soon after that DISASTROUS experiment with the M5.  
  
Anyway. The only reason they are in orbit around Earth in 1968 is that they need to intercept the mysterious Gary Seven as he transports from parts unknown to his office on Earth to complete an important mission. Who is this Gary Seven, you ask. Well, it’s not revealed till much later but I’ll just tell you now: about 6000 years ago some aliens from a very advanced society living on a planet which is yet undetected by humans abducted a few humans, took them back home, and from them bred many generations of secret agents whose job it is to meddle in human history in order to save humanity from its own self-destructive tendencies. Gary Seven for some reason does his secret agent work while carrying around a black cat named Isis who wears a rhinestone collar. Isis appears to be an ordinary North American domestic shorthair but clearly she cannot be a real cat; for one thing, she obeys commands. Anyway, Gary’s mission is to stall the nuclear arms race by sabotaging the U.S. Army’s launch of the first “orbital platform” for H-bombs in such a way that the H-bomb _almost_ goes off in the middle of the USSR (which is for some reason never named in this episode, though the writers have to commit considerable awkwardnesses in order to avoid doing so). The objective is to scare the US military into coming to their senses and realizing they should not go ahead with this project. (In the past, people believed that the US military could be persuaded to discontinue a project simply because it was ineffective, unnecessary, and highly dangerous.) Seven is hampered in his work in several ways.  
  
First he accidentally gets himself beamed aboard the Enterprise and taken into custody. Then he escapes, beams himself back to his office, and discovers that the two agents who were supposed to be taking care of this sabotage thing are MIA. (It turns out they were both killed in a car accident on the way to the base, though Seven is skeptical that this could really be what happened.) Seven assumes that Roberta, the ditzy blonde that these two agents hired as their secretary, was in their confidence; he discovers too late that they told Roberta they were researching a new encyclopedia. Anyway, Roberta now knows too much to be dispensed with, though she still doesn’t know a hell of a lot. Kirk and Spock beam down in mufti and get up into Gary Seven’s office, where Roberta delays their entry for long enough to allow Seven to apparate or use floo powder or whatever the fuck he does to get to McKinley Air Force Base, where he manages to secrete himself inside the elevator and go all the way up to the tippy top of the rocket to fuck around with the wiring. Kirk and Spock go to McKinley too and of course are immediately taken into custody. Scotty, meanwhile, has been scanning the base with the help of an old weather satellite (why he needs a satellite when he has the Enterprise’s frickin’ sensors at his command I don’t know, but I suppose Roddenberry wanted this episode to be about TV too) and finally discovered Seven meddling with the rocket. At around the same time, Roberta has blundered into Seven’s secret lair and, by fiddling with the buttons at random, manages to beam Seven back to the office moments after Scotty has beamed him up to the Enterprise.  
  
Back in the office, Seven, ignoring Roberta’s witterings about who is he and what is he doing and why is he messing with her country’s rocket, tries to implement his plan. He arms the warhead and creates the malfunction that sends the rocket on a collision course with “somewhere in the center of the Eurasian landmass.” However, before Seven can implement the key part of this stratagem—detonating the warhead while it is still far enough up not to do any damage—he is whacked on the head by Roberta. As he fights with Roberta, who is now pointing the special pen he’s been using to mindcontrol everyone with at him and demanding answers, Kirk and Spock beam in. Spock tries to use the computer to blow up the warhead but can’t figure out how to do it in the time allotted, forcing Kirk to Trust Gary Seven and let him carry out the plan as scheduled. Warhead detonates in time. And it turns out Kirk and Spock were really supposed to be there so it’s one of those temporal paradox thingies, but this is not given any more attention than the fact that Isis has just shifted into a brunette wearing that diamond collar and a godawful black ensemble. But only Roberta notices, and she becomes a cat again, and off Spock and Kirk go, indicating to Gary and Roberta that they have many adventures in store for them. **The End.**  
  
Though I am aware of the depths to which the show will plummet in Season 3, I have to say I’m glad it got picked up again. Because as bad as _Turnabout Intruder_ is, I sure would have hated for Star Trek to have ended with _this_ piece of crap.  
  
I would say that this is the worst Star Trek episode I have seen yet were it not for the fact that its primary problem is that it is not a Star Trek episode. It is the pilot episode for this ridiculous _Assignment: Earth_ show, into which Kirk, Spock, and Scotty are most uncomfortably inserted. Roddenberry goes to some lengths to get each of the regular cast members at least some screen time (mainly through a briefing scene that shows how excited people were about the idea of videoconferencing back in 1968); even Sulu eventually shows up. But since it is important that they _not_ scuttle Seven’s “mission,” and since it is also important that Seven be represented as badass enough to accomplish his own fucking mission, Kirk and Spock don’t really get to do much apart from get themselves in trouble. Kirk’s voiceover even comments on the fact that he has “never felt so helpless.” Spock gets to wear some funny hats—some wag in the wardrobe department decided to send him off to McKinley wearing an old-guy fishing hat—and Kirk gets to wear a trenchcoat, but you know, I hate seeing the two of them standing in the background like extras while Gary Seven swans about in the foreground.  
  
As for the whole _Assignment: Earth_ concept…oy.  
  
The idea, apparently, was to make Seven a kind of James Bond knockoff, explaining his supernaturally cool gadgetry as a result of alien influence. Seven’s office contains a huge and hyperadvanced computer, which does in fact contain the futuristic displays of the old M5, though they are embedded in a much larger version of the M5’s rectangular lighted board. This one talks, however, so at least there’s an interface.  
  
(On edit: The James Bond idea I found through online research; but it is now clear to me that the much more likely source for _Assignment: Earth_ was _Dr. Who._ If Roddenberry never acknowledged that, maybe it's because he was afraid people would think the shows were too similar. But the superintelligent/technologically advanced/magically capable alien partnered by the Earth girl could certainly have been lifted straight from Dr. Who.)  
  
Clearly this show would have been a version of Helm Hammerhand’s Tales of the Ponderous. There are several references to what bad shape the Earth is in in 1968; when the computer forces him to define his mission, Seven mentions that this whole force of secret agents was created in order to cope with the fact that humanity’s capacity for technical innovation has outstripped its wisdom. In what is basically the only moment when her character approaches anything shaped vaguely like dignity, Roberta tells Seven, “Look, I know we need help. That’s why some in our generation are kind of crazy rebels. We don’t know if we’re going to live to be thirty.” _Assignment: Earth_ would no doubt have allowed Gene to keep churning out plots like “Omega Glory” and “Bread and Circuses” without having the inconvenience of explaining why all these Earthlike planets keep showing up in the outer reaches of the galaxy.   
  
It would also have been a terrible show.  
  
I mean, who knows. Maybe if Gene had been given the chance to shoot a second pilot, the way he was with Star Trek, _Assignment: Earth_ might have eventually developed some potential. But as played by Robert Lansing, Gary Seven provides absolutely no incentive to watch. He has neither looks nor charisma, and as far as his emotional range he may as well be a computer program. He appears to have no sense of humor at all, and generates comedy only by playing straight man to Roberta, who generates comedy mainly by being dumb as a bag of hammers. The fact that he has to do everything with a cat draped around him doesn’t help, even if you really like cats. And he’s not even smart, apart from knowing how to work a computer. In this episode alone, the supposedly superior Seven 1) blows his own cover to Roberta, despite the fact that she clearly has no idea what he’s talking about and that the aforementioned bag-of-hammers IQ is well in evidence; 2) leaves the map indicating his next move on the desk when he knows that Kirk and Spock are in the next room trying to bust in; 3) has designed an office security system so lame that even Roberta can blunder her way into the sanctum sanctorum. The only thing he has going for him is the toys, and the fact that apparenty in 1968 security on military bases was comically abysmal (if anything, it’s worse than it was in “Tomorrow is Yesterday”).  
  
You’d like to think that, given time, the young Terri Garr might have been able to make something of Roberta. Garr is already at work on the particular brand of kooky vulnerability that would make her America’s sweetheart during the short time when the film _Tootsie_ was king of American pop culture; she can’t do anything about Roberta’s stupidity (there are a lot of reaction shots in which Roberta stares pop-eyed at something she cannot understand) but she does at least up the energy level. Once she starts to figure out what’s going on her nervous rattlings-on finally generate a moderate level of investment on the part of the viewer.  
  
But the reality is that Roberta probably wouldn’t have given Garr much room to grow. I mean you know how it would go: initially an incompetent hindrance, Roberta would slowly learn enough about Seven and his missions and his backstory to become a kind of apprentice, though probably still more of a hindrance than a help. By then she would have fallen in love with him, even though he shows no love, like, or even respect for her and he’s obviously got something going on with this Isis character; who knows, perhaps Roddenberry was already writing in his head the ‘catfight’ that would one day take place between Roberta and Isis. (Given what we’ve seen from Roddenberry so far it makes total sense to me that he’s given Seven one female sidekick who is an idiot but who talks a lot, and one female sidekick who is apparently highly intelligent, but never speaks.) That phase would have been dragged out for a while as Seven got to rescue her from more and more endangerments until…well, until the show finally got put out of its misery, I would imagine; but if it survived long enough there would undoubtedly have been some kind of godawful wedding episode…ah, it doesn’t bear thinking about.  
  
The only way to keep yourself entertained, really, is by watching the 1968 idea of super-advanced technology. Roberta is completely flabbergasted by the fact that Seven’s office includes a typewriter that takes dictation. “It’s typing everything I say! Stop it! STOP IT!” And that’s 1968 futurism in a nutshell: we can imagine voice-activation, but we also imagine we’re still going to be _typing_ shit out on _paper_. Kirk’s hilarious attempts to be unobtrusive about using his communicator on the street irresistibly remind the modern viewer of people trying have personal conversations on their cell phones in public.  
  
Anyway. Praise be to the network execs and Bjo Trimble, we got a third season of _Star Trek_ instead of season one of _Assignment: Earth_. And EVEN THOUGH Season 3 leads off with “Spock’s Brain,” I will welcome it with joy after having seen this vision of the alternative future we could have had.  
  
Up next: BRAAAAAAAAAINS!!!!


	55. SPOCK'S BRAIN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I know. This is supposed to be the worst ever. 
> 
> But once you know that "Lee Cronin" is the pseudonym of Gene L. Coon, and that Coon had by this point quit the show over, among other things, his frustration with Gene Roddenberry, and once you have had the opportunity to see some of the patterns of heinous that keep recurring in Roddenberry-written episodes...then another possibility emerges. Which is that this episode is an elaborate joke. A specific, devastating, hilarious joke made at Roddenberry's expense. And from that POV, it's pretty entertaining.

**STARDATE: May 10, 2012**

**SPOCK’S BRAIN**  
 **By “Lee Cronin” (Gene L. Coon)**  
  
Brain and brain! What is brain?  
It is not exactly what you might be expecting.  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise bridge crew is warily studying an alien spaceship which is approaching. It has an unusually sophisticated design and Scotty is very impressed by the fact that it uses “ion power,” which is something Earth technology has not managed to harness yet. A fetching brunette wearing a minidress and extra-tall go-go boots materializes on the bridge. Smiling enigmatically, she renders the entire crew unconscious with the touch of a button on her gigantic gauntlet/accessory. She wanders amongst the slumped bodies on the bridge, pausing briefly over Kirk but finally coming to rest near Spock, one hand lovingly caressing his cranium. Next thing anyone knows, they’re awake, the brunette is gone, and so is Spock. McCoy finds Spock down in sickbay on an operating table. His body is on life support and it’s fine…but his brain has been surgically removed.   
  
The hunt is on for Spock’s brain. The Enterprise chases the ion trail from the alien ship back to a planetary system with three habitable planets, none of which seem capable of producing the advanced technology that was used on Spock. Kirk decides to try the one that’s sealed in glaciers except for one narrow temperate zone. Kirk, Scotty, Chekov, and some security guys beam down—once again, without so much as a sweater—and encounter large hairy humanoids living in primitive conditions. All these humanoids are men, and appear to have no idea what women are, though they rave at some length about the “others” who live beneath the surface and are “givers of pain and delight.”  
  
Kirk has McCoy beam down with Spock’s brainless body, which has been fitted up with a special cranial unit which enables a second party to operate him by remote control. Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, and the robotic Spock find the entrance to an elevator that takes them far below the surface, where they are met by a fetching blonde in a very similar minidress and go-go boots. Kirk stuns her before she can knock them out. Upon awakening, the blonde, who gives her name as Luma, is unable to answer any of their questions; McCoy says she has “the mind of a child,” though I will tell you that my four-year-old is smarter and more articulate than Luma. They do, however, pick up Spock’s disembodied voice on a communicator. Spock is pleased to hear from them but cannot describe where he is. They search the complex, encounter Kara (the brunette from before), and get rendered unconscious again, though it is established that the magic knockout button has no effect whatever on the brainless Spock.   
  
Reviving in the council chamber, they discover they all have pain belts strapped around their waists which they can’t get off. Kara, who appears to be in charge, is perhaps slightly less stupid than Luma but still spectacularly dumb. She can barely understand Kirk’s questions, let alone respond to them; it is she who, after Kirk demands for the fourth or fifth time that they restore Spock’s brain, blurts out the immortal line, “Brain and brain! What is brain?” Eventually Kirk uses the work “control,” which allows them to figure out that Spock’s brain is being used as the “controller” that operates the whole subterranean complex. It is, of course, forbidden for them to see the controller. Left alone with some troglodyte guards, Kirk, Scotty, and McCoy manage to overpower them, grab their communicators and stuff, and make their way down to the control room. Kara immediately fires up their pain belts; but while writhing on the floor Kirk manages to grab the remote and get the brainless Spock, who of course feels no pain at all, to push the magic button that releases the belts. Kara is then easily overpowered; but they’re no closer to figuring out how to get Spock’s brain out of the machine and back into his body.  
  
At length they extract from Kara and from the disembodied Spock the fact that the room they’re in contains a computer that stores all the knowledge of the highly advanced society that eventually atrophied into this mess. This knowledge can be transferred into an individual’s brain by means of a beehive dryer with a lot of metal bolts glued to it dangling from a metal wire. Kara puts this thing on—it is called ‘the teacher’—and magically becomes capable of rational speech; she acknowledges that she was the one who, under the influence of the teacher, removed Spock’s brain, but refuses to restore it. McCoy volunteers to put on ‘the teacher’ and do the operation himself. McCoy puts his head under the beehive, undergoes some kind of migraine headache, and then drops to his knees murmuring about how brain surgery is child’s play.  
  
The operation begins. Initially, it goes swimmingly, with McCoy operating at “warp speed” as Kirk gives Kara the whole “you’ll be better off without your all-powerful computerized guardian/god” speech we’re familiar with from “The Apple,” “Return of the Archons,” and “Gamesters of Triskelion.” But the knowledge imparted by the ‘teacher’ is temporary, and it starts to wear off. A panicked McCoy manages to get Spock’s speech centers and vocal cords connected up so that Spock can guide him through the rest of the operation by letting him know when he’s connected a nerve properly. McCoy finally finishes. Spock sits up; he’s right as rain. He begins a discourse on the history of this culture—evidently, when the ice age hit, the society split up, sending the women to safety down below while the men remained on the surface, and the current state of affairs is the result of hundreds of years of divergence. McCoy expresses regret that he ever reconnected Spock’s mouth. A good laugh is had by all. **The End.**  
  
This one is, of course, legendary for its badness. Before there was ‘jumping the shark,’ when you wanted a synonym for really crappy TV, you went with “Spock’s Brain.” Shatner and Nimoy have both gone on record about how much they hated this episode and how painful filming it was. The brain-stealing premise is irretrievably silly, and it produces some spectacularly ridiculous dialogue. Every time Kirk has to use the phrase “Spock’s brain” and take it seriously, you can feel Shatner dying a little inside. But he’s not the only one affected; it’s McCoy, after all, who has to stare dramatically into the camera and say, “His brain is gone!” The jumpsuited console-craniumed remote-control brainless Spockbot is also ridiculous—even before they add the ratchety sound effect that implies that Spockbot actually has gears. And then there’s the women.  
  
Here’s the thing, though. There are various stories about how Coon came to create and submit the script for this turkey, but on the evidence of the rewatch I incline to the theory that Coon was deliberately spoofing the show—or more specifically, deliberately writing a script that everyone _but_ Gene Roddenberry would immediately recognize as awful. In other words, in “Spock’s Brain,” Coon was not sending up the show itself so much as sending up Gene Roddenberry. And specifically, “Spock’s Brain” is a satire on Roddenberry’s insane gender politics.  
  
I base this on the fact that the gynocentric society in which our heroes find themselves portrays women in a way that is wholly inconsistent with the way Coon represents women and femininity in “Metamorphosis” and “Devil in the Dark.” Coon is not exactly Judith Butler, but both of these episodes show evidence of someone who has actually thought about gender in a speculative way, and whose ideas about femininity, while essentialist and in some ways fairly traditional, are still a lot more complex and compassionate than those on view in the other episodes.    
  
In “Spock’s Brain,” however, what we get is the distilled essence of what we might call RoddenberryGenderFail. Not only are all the women improbably young, beautiful, and scantily clad, but they are almost literally brainless. The premise seems, in fact, to have been calculated to create opportunities to send up stereotypes about feminine irrationality, stupidity and incompetence. Viewed that way, the whole episode becomes a joke about brain surgery’s status (shared with rocket science) as the go-to metaphor for the very hardest of hard science—something so technically and intellectually difficult that only (implicitly male) geniuses can do it. Scotty observes at one point that he’s seen no evidence that the women on that planet are capable of carrying out Spock’s operation—he delivers it straight, but the joke is of course that this collection of glamorous imbeciles can barely figure out how to press the buttons on their magic jewelry, let alone do brain surgery. The fact that these women have become so abysmally stupid that they have to compensate for their collective lack of brain by literally stealing one from a man is, from that point of view, a comical exaggeration of the identification of intelligence and rationality with masculinity.   
  
And then there is the definition of “women” as “givers of pain and delight.” You remember in “A Private Little War” I was talking about how on the one hand, the Canutu woman is a rampaging dominatrix who can control any man with a wave of her enchantoplant and on the other hand is completely unable to stop men from raping her? The women of “Spock’s Brain” embody the same combination of terrifying power and complete helplessness. Roddenberry apparently found this tantalizing. Coon evidently found it ridiculous—or so I assume from the way he handles the whole “pain belt” thing. The belts go around their waists and are fastened in front by an enormous round disk which is apparently some kind of shock device. From Kirk’s line “what a way to keep a man under control,” I formed the sneaking suspicion that Coon’s script originally had the pain disk located right over their genitals, and the production team decided that was just too far to go. Certainly its positioning remains suggestive. But whereas in “Gamesters” the whole pain collar/whips/leather thing was legitimately painful and therefore legitimately kinky, here Coon renders the dominatrix thing so goofily literal and at the same time so vacuous that it becomes ludicrous.   
  
So yeah. My hypothesis is that this episode is a joke. It is, specifically, a very clever attack on the badness of Gene Roddenberry’s writing for Star Trek carried out by someone intimately and no doubt harrowingly familiar with what he is mocking. But here’s the thing. Even though he’s deliberately writing a bad Gene Roddenberry episode, Gene L. Coon _cannot actually write as badly as Roddenberry does._ In other words, even though in terms of the premise and the dialogue “Spock’s Brain” is intentionally bad, it is still a decently-constructed episode which incorporates enough of the Spock/Kirk/Bones stuff that we know and love to make it not only watchable but pretty entertaining. And as much as they no doubt hated the script in their hearts, our trio still gave it their all. Kelley’s performance is particularly arresting; I remember the panic on his face during the operation from all that long time ago. The fact that Spock and McCoy have to collaborate during the operation is duly mined for one-liners—“I’ll never live this down; this Vulcan is telling _me_ how to operate”—and as ridiculous as Spockbot is in so many ways, there is also something creepy about the way Nimoy does his vacated body.  
  
The upshot of all this is that in fact, I would say, “Spock’s Brain” is not actually the worst episode in the history of ST:TOS. It may be the most ridiculous. But if you put it up against, say, “The Alternative Factor,” which is incoherent and excruciatingly boring, or “A Private Little War,” which is incoherent and thoroughly unpleasant from start to finish, or “The Omega Glory,” in which we are asked to take seriously a premise just as ridiculous as the one behind “Spock’s Brain,” in terms of being something you might actually derive some entertainment from watching, I think it beats them all. Certainly I would back it over some of the ones coming up—I might mention “And the Children Shall Lead,” which looks from the trailer to be every bit as bad as I remembered it being.   
  
  
  
Up next: "The Enterprise Incident."


	56. THE ENTERPRISE INCIDENT

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At last, Dorothy Catherine really knocks one out of the park. All props also to Joanne Linville, the guest star. 
> 
> Of all the Spock romances, this is the only one that seemed credible to me. It's the only episode in which he seems to be sort of falling in love without being under the influence of some powerful de-Vulcanizing external force.

**STARDATE: June 28, 2012**

**THE ENTERPRISE INCIDENT**  
 **By D. C. Fontana**  
  
Come back, Dorothy! All is forgiven!  
  
Well…not all. But most!  
  
 **The Summary:** As Kirk prowls the bridge giving the crew what we in my family call the “insect lip” look of extreme uptightness, McCoy’s voiceover, excuse me, medical log informs us that Kirk has been acting irritable, irrational, and erratic of late. No, I mean more than usual. After snipping, snapping, and sniping at the bridge crew, Kirk orders Sulu to change course and head straight into the neutral zone. With great misgivings, he does it. The Enterprise sails through the neutral zone and straight into Romulan territory, where it is promptly surrounded by three Romulan starships who are invisible to the sensors right up until the point where they de-cloak. Yes, the Romulans have stolen, excuse me, adapted the Klingon cloaking device for their own purposes, so that now in addition to being invisible to the naked eye (as they were in “Balance of Terror”) they are also invisible to the sensors (as, weirdly, they were not in “Balance of Terror”). Romulan subcommander Tal tells Kirk they have an hour to surrender. Kirk, surmising that what the Romulans really want is to capture the ship intact (as has already been established, Romulan SOP is to take no prisoners), asks for advice down in the briefing room and is smacked down by an understandably annoyed but unusually expressive Spock for getting them into this situation in the first place. A new offer comes through from the Romulans: the captain wants to see Kirk and Spock on board their vessel. A simultaneous hostage exchange is set up and Kirk and Spock beam aboard where we discover that the Romulan captain is…A WOMAN! Dun dun DUNNNNNNNN!!!!! It is also evident pretty early on that she’s kind of hot for Vulcans.  
  
The captain (we the viewers are never vouchsafed her proper name) sends Spock out and interrogates Kirk, who claims they blundered into Romulan territory due to instrument failure. The Romulan captain, who did not just fall off the plomeek truck, brings Spock in and interrogates him, appealing to the apparently well-known fact that Vulcans are incapable of lying. After not too much of a show of reluctance Spock gives it up that Kirk gave the order to go into Romulan territory without any orders from up above in Starfleet based on his own “lust for glory,” throwing in as a freebie the information that Kirk is “not sane.” Kirk is hauled off to the brig while the Romulan captain makes a play for Spock. When I say “makes a play,” what I mean is that in addition to leaning back in her big leather captainy chair in such a way that her charms are as much on display as they can be in that Romulan uniform, she also points out, reasonably enough, that 18 years is a long time for a guy with Spock’s abilities to be serving under other people and that she would certainly make sure Spock got his own command if only Spock would get it into his head that the Federation is not “the whole universe.” Spock appears intrigued.   
  
Meanwhile, down in the brig, Kirk fucks himself up by slamming his entire body into a nasty forcefield. For reasons best known to themselves, they apparently care whether Kirk lives or dies, so the Romulans bring over Dr. McCoy to attend to him. By the time the Romulan captain and Spock make it down to the cell, Spock has already wangled a dinner invitation from Captain Hotforvulcans and persuaded her to make it guard-free. In the cell, McCoy reports on Kirk’s condition, which is not good; as it becomes clear to both Kirk and McCoy that Spock is now playing on Captain HFV’s team, an enraged Kirk charges Spock with the expressed intention of killing him; Spock puts a hand over Kirk’s face and bends his neck back in a most awkward-looking way. McCoy examines Kirk and yells, “What did you do to him? What did you do?” Spock says that he instinctively used the Vulcan death grip. McCoy says, “Well, your instincts are still good. He’s dead.”  
  
McCoy and Kirk’s inert form beam back over to the Enterprise while Spock shows up for his dinner invitation. While Captain HFV seduces him with Vulcan delicacies, some kind of bright blue beverage, and talk of how Romulan women are different from Vulcan ones, Nurse Chapel is passing by Kirk’s body and sees his eyes open. An irritated McCoy explains that Spock only _simulated_ Kirk’s death by nerve-pinching him. McCoy has now finally figured out or been told (it’s unclear) that Kirk and Spock in cahoots and carrying out a special super secret undercover mission to steal a Romulan cloaking device and take it back to Starfleet. Revived, Kirk points out that the “Vulcan death grip” really put a crick in his neck, to which Nurse Chapel replies, “There’s no such thing as a Vulcan death grip.” Anyway, McCoy surgically alters Kirk’s ears and eyebrows to make him look Romulan, and he puts on a Romulan uniform and beams over to the Romulan ship. Spock persuades Captain HFV to slip into something more comfortable, which gives him the opportunity to finally communicate with Kirk and tell him where the cloaking device is. Kirk gets himself into the special secret cloaking device room and finds the thing; he pops it out of the console and beams away with it.   
  
Meanwhile, of course, Spock’s transmission was picked up by the Romulan monitors and subcommander Tal traces it to Captain HFV’s quarters. Spock, caught dead to rights, turns himself in and inquires as to their current method of execution. Captain HFV rushes down to the secret cloaking device room and finds it gone.   
  
While preparations for boarding the Enterprise commence, Scotty installs the cloaking device. They isolate Spock’s vital signs and beam him aboard; just before he dematerializes, Captain HFV throws herself at him so she winds up coming along for the ride. Spock and Captain HFV show up; when Kirk contacts the Romulan ship, she orders Tal to open fire. The Enterprise, already speeding away at warp factor 9, finally manages to avoid this fate when the cloaking device engages and the Romulan ships go off on a wild goose chase. The now-captive Captain HFV is escorted by Spock to her quarters; along the way they have a short conversation I will discuss in more detail below. Spock returns to the bridge. McCoy calls up to tell Kirk to report to sickbay to get his face and ears restored. Spock urges him to go, saying that on humans the effect of the ears and eyebrows is not aesthetically pleasing. Kirk heads to sickbay, and Spock takes over, and it’s off we go, warp factor whatever. **The End.**  
  
After bitching as much as I have about Fontana’s episodes, I have to start by giving her props for this one. It certainly outclasses her previous efforts--as well as any episode Gene Roddenberry was ever involved with--and I would say it ranks right up there with the best of them. Not, especially, because of the espionage/thriller part of the plot, which is merely a mostly-adequate pedestal upon which to mount what really matters about this episode, which is Spock’s encounter with the Romulan captain.  
  
Captain Hotforvulcans expands the very small club (other members: T’Pring, T’Pao, and maybe Thalassa/Mcwhatever from “Return to Tomorrow”) of compelling female characters on this show. Partly the credit has to go to whoever cast Linville. Older than most of the show’s female guest stars and with a low, slightly gravelly voice, Linville is totally credible as a career officer who has risen through the ranks of a hierarchical and male-dominated military organization based on her intelligence, political savvy, and ability to make men obey her. She has a great body and a mature face, which means that she is hot in a kind of Mrs. Robinson way, as opposed to, say, a Shahna kind of way. There is also a minimum of overt bullshit about her being a woman in a position of authority. Nobody on her own ship questions her authority or her fitness to command, and though Kirk—who has earlier been shown assuming that the Romulan captain must be a man—registers astonishment when she spins around in her big leather chair and Reveals Herself, he doesn’t make a big deal out of it either. Her femininity matters only in two respects: one, her being a woman in a man’s world provides some motivation for her decision to try to capture the Enterprise instead of blowing it up (she explains to Spock that it would be a huge boost for her career to bring it home intact), and two, her being female means that she can be a romantic interest for Spock. I mean overtly, in canon and everything.  
  
And although I never thought I would hear myself say this about a _Star Trek_ episode that wasn’t “The City on the Edge of Forever,” the romance is actually the best part of this episode. The plot is so structured that it’s not until the seduction of Spock is well underway that the viewers are finally informed that Spock is acting as a double agent. Now, faithful viewers were probably not willing to seriously entertain the possibility that Spock would really turn on Kirk; but Fontana does a pretty good job of making it credible. Everything Captain HFV insinuates about why Spock is still a first officer after 18 years of kicking ass and taking names is perfectly plausible; and so is her little speech about why Romulans, as an offshoot of the same original stock from which the Vulcans descended, can appreciate their “distant brothers” in ways that humans can’t. We, meanwhile, have seen enough of crazycakes Kirk  to know that Spock has a billion legitimate reasons to be fed up with him.   
  
More to the point, Spock appears to be genuinely attracted to Captain HFV. As she is canny enough to point out to him, a Romulan woman is not a bad match for a half-human, half-Vulcan hybrid: she appreciates Vulcan culture and the Vulcan dedication to logic above all else, but makes it clear that she has a sensual side. Whereas in “This Side of Paradise,” the fact that Spock could only feel love or sexual attraction to Leila while whacked with happy spores made the romance irretrievably goofy, in Captain HFV Spock has finally encountered a woman who appreciates and can connect with his Vulcanness instead of just wishing he would be more human. Although his mind is clearly on his mission during their dinner date, Spock is also clearly susceptible to the sensual appeal of the Vulcan delicacies and mood lighting; and neither the viewer nor, one senses, Spock himself knows how sincere he is being at any given moment. For instance, when she whispers her real name to him, and he comments on how beautiful and rare it is, and then suggests that it’s a little incongruous “coming from a soldier,” Spock is being both strategic (in that it finally gets her to leave him alone for a couple seconds to call Kirk) and, one can’t help feeling, genuine (in that he is really moved by her gesture of intimacy and wishes to respond in kind). Instead of a traditional clinch, they wind up touching hands—Nimoy has talked about his conception of the Vulcans as hand-centered people—and touching each other’s faces, which I have to say, as pathetic as it’s gonna make me sound, struck me as a lot hotter than watching Kirk suck face with one of his spacebabes. When Captain HFV says she never knew she could feel this much from the touch of “an alien hand,” Spock says that he is also “moved emotionally.” And then, of course, that asshole subcommander Tal barges in.  
  
It’s the ambiguity that’s hot. We know that on one level Spock is desperate to get the hell out of her quarters so he can complete the mission and escape; but at the same time, he also seems reluctant to hurry things along, and to be both profoundly touched by his contact with her and saddened to know that it can only be temporary. This is confirmed by his final conversation with Captain HFV back on the Enterprise, in which she tells him bitterly that the Romulans will soon find a way to penetrate that cloaking device. Spock agrees: “Military secrets are among the most fleeting. I hope you and I have exchanged something more permanent.” He clearly indicates that his response to her was not purely strategic, and explains his decision to remain loyal to the Enterprise instead of to his feelings for her by saying that it was “the only choice possible—and the only choice you would have respected.” Which is probably true; her Vulcan fixation appears to be connected to her belief in their honor. As much as his betrayal of her personally fucks that up for her in the short term, knowing that he had betrayed his original command for personal gain would probably have fucked it up for her in the long term. She leaves him saying that “it will remain our secret,” to which we never see him respond.  
  
Where, one might ask, does all of this leave That Man On The Bridge? It is interesting that Spock never cites his personal loyalty to Kirk to Captain HFV, though the plot gives him opportunities, and that we don’t get to see Spock and Kirk make up at the end; the final banter about the ears is more reminiscent of how Spock normally interacts with McCoy, and Kirk seems a little surprised at Spock’s insistence that he get his ugly human mug out from under those beautiful ears and eyebrows. A little weird looking at your last love interest’s features on your previous love interest’s face, is it, Spock? Or is it just that you never realized until that moment how important that whole eroticization of difference thing is to that thing you have going on with That Man? The fact that he now, apparently, has a secret with Captain HFV that he’s not sharing with Kirk would appear to be kind of a wedge.  
  
Or does he? Kirk is there, after all, for their first encounter, and he certainly picks up on Captain HFV’s “special interest” in Spock—and she does, after all, materialize in a slinky evening gown and jewelry which even Kirk must know is not regulation. (Indeed, her evening ensemble is far more fashionable than anything any Romulan has been seen wearing in any incarnation of Trek, ever.) Kirk is the one who, when Captain HFV asks to be shown to the brig, decides that instead Spock will have the opportunity to ‘escort her to her quarters’—which guarantees him the opportunity to talk to her in private. Kirk also gives Spock the opportunity to talk to Leila in private at the end of “This Side of Paradise.” Guy must be pretty confident that no matter how tempting the other offers may be, honey badger’s always comin’ back to the bridge.  
  
So anyway, this episode does a great job developing aspects of Spock’s character which are new but not completely inconsistent with what we already know about him, and it gives him a romance which actually enhances the dignity of both participants (unlike the crap Roddenberry’s always written for him and Nurse Chapel). As a spy thriller, well, I’m not a huge fan of the genre—partly because I cannot help noticing that most of what happens in the typical action movie is totally implausible under real-world conditions. In that sense, the implausibilities of “The Enterprise Incident” are kind of par for the course—except for the outrageous fact that the cloaking device is just _sitting there_ on top of the console, and Kirk is able to grab it and abscond with it without using so much as a Phillips head screwdriver. (It looks like some kind of funky table lamp and in fact they appear to have made it by taking NOMAD’s ‘head’ and shoving it into a frosted glass light fixture.) You figure something capable of rendering a starship invisible and untraceable must at a minimum be radioactive. There is also the fact that this plan, even in the world of spy thrillers, is spectacularly risky in that it depends on the Romulans making a long series of decisions which can in no way be taken for granted. Why, for instance, they don’t just kill Kirk once they convict him of espionage, or why they bother getting him medical attention, or why their doctors don’t insist on an autopsy, or why they allow the body to be transferred back to the Enterprise in the first place, are all excellent questions without convincing answers; and that’s just the tip of the implausibility iceberg. As with most thrillers, though, the episode gets by because it rattles along too fast to give people time to think about whether any of this would really happen this way anywhere under any circumstances in the history of ever. It doesn't go fast enough to convince you that Kirk is really dead, though, since we've now seen each of the senior officers 'die' at least once (Kirk in "Amok Time," McCoy in "Shore Leave," Spock in "Return to Tomorrow"). But one wouldn't want to give up the whole "Vulcan death grip" thing--and there is something fascinating yet kind of scary about watching Spock turn on Kirk. You realize how lucky it is that Spock has made a fetish out of loyalty, because otherwise, there'd be only so much he could take on that ship before he just came up to the bridge with a flamethrower one day and put the whole lot of them out of his misery, That Man included.  
  
  
  
Up next: "The Paradise Syndrome." More faux-Native Americans, more Hodgkin's Law, and more KIROOOOOOOOOOK!!!!!!!!!!


	57. THE PARADISE SYNDROME

**STARDATE: June 30, 2012**

**THE PARADISE SYNDROME**  
 **By Margaret Armen**  
  
 **The Summary:** The camera pans over a lovely sylvan landscape as the Star Trek theme song is trilled on an alto flute. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are discovered walking along a parks service trail and discussing the fact that the planet looks exactly like Earth. Asked what the odds are of such parallel development on a planet so far from home, Spock says they are “astronomical.” At which point a dapper Spaniard with a curly mane, a six-fingered sword, and limpid brown slashworthy eyes appears before them and says, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”  
  
Yeah, no, that doesn’t happen. But seriously. This is the sixth fucking time they have encountered a planet whose development parallels earth in an improbably exact way. OK, “Piece of the Action” and “Patterns of Force” can be explained through contamination…but after “Miri,” “The Omega Glory,” and “Bread and Circuses,” I think a better response to “What are the odds?” would be “They appear to be increasingly rapidly, Captain.”  
  
I resume.  
  
Our three friends are investigating this planet because they’ve figured out that an asteroid is on a collision course with it and will, if not diverted, wipe the whole thing out. They plan to go back up in about half an hour and get on with the job of diverting the asteroid. But first, they discover a strange obelisk of some sort of probe-resistant material covered with metal markings. Spock says that these “incised symbols” are evidently some form of writing. At which point the dapper little Spaniard returns and says, “I hate to interrupt, but ‘incised’ does not mean what you think it means either.”   
  
All right, no, that doesn’t happen…but seriously, those symbols are not incised, they are embossed, and surely Spock knows that.  
  
I resume.   
  
Whilst looking around they spy an encampment of humanoids on the other side of the lake. Said humanoids and their encampment look astonishingly like, as McCoy says, “American Indians.” Kirk talks about how awesome it would be to lead such a simple existence, while McCoy teases him about having “Tahiti syndrome.” While he and Spock wander some more, Kirk decides to take another look at the obelisk. He calls up to the Enterprise, at which point a slab slides open, he falls into the obelisk, and he gets zapped by some sort of electric shock and is down for the count.  
  
Spock and McCoy, unable to figure out where their captain has disappeared to (dudes…could he be INSIDE THE OBELISK HE TOLD YOU HE WAS GOING TO TAKE A LOOK AT?), return to the Enterprise to go divert the asteroid. Meanwhile, a dazed and amnesiac Kirk staggers out of the obelisk to find two lovely maidens laying an offering at the temple. Before you can say “Heart of Darkness” everyone’s revering Kirk as a god whose name, they believe, is Kirok and who will save them from the coming apocalypse. Kirk has a vague sense that he is from somewhere else and that he’s not who they think he is, but nevertheless falls in love with Miramanee, the local priestess, incurring the jealousy of Salish, the ex-medicine man. While the Enterprise fails to divert the asteroid, Kirk marries Miramanee. Spock manages to short out the Enterprise’s warp engines, so they have to get back to the planet on impulse power, which takes two months and puts them only 4 hours ahead of the asteroid. While they wait, Spock works night and day trying to decipher the runes on the temple while McCoy fusses at him to get some sleep.  
  
After two months of frolicking, Miramanee informs Kirk that she’s pregnant. He’s overjoyed. Alas, the asteroid is within crushin’ distance and it’s time for Kirk to do what a god is supposed to do in this situation, which is open the temple and make the “blue flame” come out. Well, Kirk has no fuckin’ clue how to do that; and after throwing his arms wide and screaming “I AM KIROK!!” fails to accomplish anything, his aggrieved people try to stone him on the steps of the temple. Miramanee goes up there with him and gets pelted with Styrofoam. Spock and McCoy beam down; the people scatter. Spock has to do the “Vulcan mind fusion”—  
  
Yes. Yes, Inigo, I know it’s usually called a Vulcan mindmeld. Go fight the Man in Black or something, will you?  
  
So, Spock mind-melds with Kirk and drags him kicking and screaming back to his previous identity. Spock has cracked the obelisk code and knows that it was left there by the “Protectors,” a ‘super-race’ that was in the business of saving primitive cultures from extinction and ‘seeding’ them across the galaxy. Evidently understanding that this planet is in a particularly asteroid-heavy district, they set up this asteroid deflector and taught people how to use it; sadly, Salish’s dad passed on before teaching him the secret. Anyhow, Kirk and Spock figure out that if Kirk just whips out the communicator and repeats what he said the first time, they can get the obelisk to open. So he and Spock go in, and Spock figures out what button to push, and the blue beam deflects the asteroid and all is well, except of course for the fact that Miramanee is dying from her Styrofoam-inflicted injuries.  
  
McCoy gives Kirk the bad news; Kirk has a tearful goodbye with Miramanee; the credits roll; the Enterprise rides into the sunset. **The End.**  
  
As long as we’re talking about syndromes, let’s talk about Dances With Wolves Syndrome.

DWWS, as it shall henceforth be known, accounts for nearly all of what is wrong with this episode. This episode predates the execrable Kevin Costner vehicle which gave the syndrome its name by many decades, of course; but it all goes back to the same white man’s fantasy. This is the fantasy where the white guy travels out into Native American country, is recognized by the Native Americans as neat and cool and not at all like those other asshole white guys, and has his innate superiority ratified when he is finally adopted into the tribe. It is characteristic of DWWS that the white guy’s induction into the tribe is treated as far more important than the fate of the tribe itself—even when, as in _Dances With Wolves_ , the destruction of the tribe is actually caused by the white guy’s involvement with them.  Behind every instance of DWWS is a white guy whining, “Indians get to do all the cool stuff! I want to be an Indian TOO! Only don’t think for one fucking instant that I’m gonna give up any of my white privilege while I do it!”  
  
This episode was written by Margaret Armen, who also gave us “Gamesters of Triskelion.” Since it appears from “Gamesters” that she is quite capable of creating an alien culture, I’m going to blame this episode’s bad case of DWWS on Gene Roddenberry. He, after all, is credited on the two other episodes tainted by DWWS, viz., “A Private Little War” and “The Omega Glory;” and rightly or wrongly I choose to believe that either he let it be known that he was looking for more episodes where the main characters would get to be Indians, or that he rewrote a script that was originally about an alien culture. After all, McCoy refers to Kirk’s pining after a simpler way of life as “Tahiti Syndrome;” maybe if they’d had more money they’d have gone Polynesian with it. Which, based on the evidence of “The Apple,” might not have improved things; but at least it’d have been a different kind of suck. At any rate, this episode comes with the usual raft of pukeworthy assumptions about “primitive” cultures, such as:  
  
1) They have not a care in the world (apart from, you know, crop failure, disease, infant mortality, wild animals, malnutrition, and giant asteroids)  
  
2) They cannot form complex sentences or use contractions, nor do they have any sense of humor whatsoever  
  
3) They understand so little about the universe that attempting to explain the imminent arrival of the asteroid would only “confuse” them (even though it later transpires that they already know that asteroid is on the way)  
  
4) Their sensual women really enjoy serving men in all senses of the word, and find white men especially attractive; not a single one of them is discontented with her lot or harbors any ambitions apart from the bearing of children  
  
5) They assume that any light-skinned stranger is a god until it is proven otherwise  
  
6) This makes them especially psyched to have white people living and moving amongst them  
  
and so on. The fact that in this case the “primitive” culture is specifically marked as Native American (though in a very generic way; Spock says their culture incorporates elements of several different tribes, which gets them off the hook as far as cultural accuracy goes) makes the offense more specific; there is something just foul about watching actors in dark makeup and black wigs acting like every faux Indian in every bad Western ever made while adoring a white guy decked out in buckskins, knowing as one does whose fault it is (at least on our planet) that this “primitive” culture came to be “facing extinction.” I get the same upsurge of the gorge when I see all the huge Kokopellis adorning the motels and chain restaurants in Sedona. Kill what you can, then appropriate the rest. Hooray for manifest destiny.  
  
I got this far and I thought, well, really, do I have a leg to stand on? After all, I have perpetrated fantasy [myself](http://www.plaidder.com/wof), and when you come right down to it, a lot of fantasy is driven by the same nostalgia for a “simpler” time before technology got out of control. A lot of fantasy written by white people such as myself also attempts to incorporate into a white world many of the things which have, from about the nineteenth century onward, been forced out of industrialized Western culture and relegated to nonwhite, marginalized, and/or Third World cultures. Though the WOFverse is mostly derived from European sources, there are obvious borrowings from other traditions as well. If you believe, as I do, that all creative writing is really synthetic, then it stands to reason that fantasy steals from its authors’ Others all the time. Is the problem with “The Paradise Syndrome,” or even the far more insanely offensive “The Omega Glory,” simply that Roddenberry and Armen didn’t do enough work to camouflage what they stole?   
  
Having stared at that paragraph for a little while, this occurs to me: The process of synthesis is really what separates the sheep from the goats. Everyone is to some extent working with stolen goods, but there’s a big difference between people who are able to combine all those bits and pieces into something nobody’s ever seen before, and people who just throw it all into a pot and stir once. The political offense of something like “The Paradise Syndrome” is related to the intellectual offense offered by the sheer laziness of the premise: hey, instead of trying to build my own world how about I just throw a bunch of clichés in a bag and shake it for a little while and see what comes out. Then there’s the fact that by explicitly making the aliens Native Americans the episode is making all kinds of claims about an actual existing group of people. And that all gets worse when we get into this “protectors” thing.  
  
Because by the way…you know the whole Navajo/Anasazi plot line on the _X-Files_? And that TNG episode “The Chase?” And the singing spaceship in _Close Encounters_? And the giant white face in _Mission To Mars_? And all the other plots about some race of uberhumanoids traveling through the galaxy scattering seeds hither and yon and then finding some way of bringing us all together at last and proving that we’re all descended from the same beings? All that bullshit starts RIGHT HERE, people. When Spock finally cracks the code—the breakthrough comes when he starts noodling around on his Vulcan harp and realizes that the symbols are musical rather than alphabetical—and explains to McCoy that this planet was set up as a kind of terrarium for one of many “primitive” cultures that the Protectors decided to save from extinction, McCoy mutters, “I’ve always wondered why there were so many humanoids in the galaxy.” This is not the first time this idea has come up; the idea that humans are descended from “superbeings” who have also left descendants on other planets is part of the premise of “Return to Tomorrow” and “Who Mourns for Adonais?” Now, we could explain this cynically as an attempt to justify the fact that for practical reasons most alien characters have to be played by human actors.   
  
But we could also explain it—perhaps even more cynically, who knows—as an attempt to re-establish human superiority and significance in the face of a universe so unimaginably vast that one species grimly struggling for survival on one tiny planet couldn’t possibly matter worth a damn.  _Star Trek_ is just one of many texts that show that we have never really accepted the idea that the Earth is not the center of the universe; all this “Hodgkins’ Law of Parallel Planetary Development” bullshit is just a particularly bald expression of something common to a lot of speculative fiction, which is that no matter where in the universe humans travel what they always find there is some version of themselves. And as much as we may feel superior to Miramanee and her naïve belief in Kirk’s godhood, what after all is this “superbeing” hypothesis but an attempt to reclaim our sense of ourselves as the chosen people by claiming a privileged connection to some universal creative force?  
  
Anyway.   
  
If you could subtract all the faux-Native American crap, it wouldn’t be a bad episode. It’s true that the amnesia prevents Shatner from playing to his strengths; Kirk’s fogginess renders him unusually passive and vague, and as in “This Side of Paradise,” falling in love appears to have a kind of tranquilizing effect. We don’t really get to see The Shatner come out until the climactic moments at the temple, when he’s bellowing “I AM KIROK!” for all he’s worth. At the same time, there are some poignant little moments that make you wish they’d done it all differently. Kirk doesn’t remember anything specific about his previous life, but he does have the impression that he has never been happy there. The turning point in his relationship with Miramanee, and the tribe in general, comes when he tells her that he needs “time to think” about what’s going on, and she says that time is something they have plenty of. You can see, in the instant before Kirk’s response, that this is a revelation to him; in the universe as he’s known it so far, time is a scarce and precious resource which has to be carefully rationed. Really, his life as captain of the Enterprise has been one long string of countdowns and deadlines and crises in which some really difficult thing has to be done in an impossibly short amount of time or else the ship blows up. Getting off the temporal treadmill does wonders for him. This is made all the more obvious by the B plot, in which Spock and company are severely punished for going over the 30-minute deadline Spock establishes at the beginning of the episode. The extra time spent searching for Kirk (dude, he is IN THE FUCKING OBELISK) means they have to burn rubber getting to the diversion point; by that point their power levels are so low that they can neither turn it aside nor split it open.   
  
The most interesting part of the episode, from that point of view, is Spock’s “mind fusion” with Kirk. It is strongly implied that Kirk is actively resisting Spock’s attempts to restore his memory and return him to his former life. After trying to shift him from “Kirok” back to “Kirk,” Spock suddenly snaps himself out of it; when McCoy asks if he’s all right, Spock says something cryptic about Kirk being an ‘extremely dynamic individual.’ I’ll say; this is the first time we’ve seen anyone fight off a mindmeld even momentarily. The decision to end with Kirk saying goodbye to Miramanee and watching her die, instead of a round of final banter on the bridge, tries to give the relationship some gravitas, though frankly Miramanee is such an undefined character that as you watch her die it’s hard to ignore, for instance, the fact that she’s supposed to have been stoned to death and yet does not sport a single bruise or laceration.   
  
So this is a scenario with real potential; but it is all very much blighted by DWWS. In the end perhaps the best thing we can say about it is that it inspired the TNG episode “Inner Light,” in which a probe sent out by a dying culture enables Picard to have the experience of living for decades in their midst, settling down, raising children, and learning to play the flute.  
  
But as it is, well, I’m sorry, Margaret. It’s no “Gamesters of Triskelion.” All the same, we have “And the Children Shall Lead” coming up, and that’s gonna make “Paradise Syndrome” look like the city on the frickin’ edge of forever.


	58. AND THE CHILDREN SHALL LEAD

**July 3, 2012**

**AND THE CHILDREN SHALL LEAD**  
 **By Edward J. Lakso**  
  
And the fail shall rain down upon the earth in buckets.  
  
 **The Summary:** Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to check out a scientific colony on Planet Cheapset from which they have received a distress signal. They discover that all the adults are dead apart from Dr. Starns, the head of the colony, who is raving about destroying himself and “THE ENEMY WITHIN!” when he finally collapses. They have just about figured out that the entire staff have killed themselves when a gaggle of children rushes in, scampering about and playing ring around the rosy while a horrified Kirk stares stoically toward the camera. McCoy thinks that the fact that the kids don’t seem at all bothered by the sight of the corpses of their parents strewn across the sound stage is due to some kind of traumatic shock and that trying to get them to talk about what happened would be dangerous. Kirk sends the kids back up with McCoy and he and Spock check out a nearby cave. Spock’s tricorder registers something, but he cannot say exactly what. Kirk starts to get unexplained feelings of anxiety, which get so bad he eventually has to flee the cave.   
  
Up on the Enterprise, Nurse Chapel is making good use of her medical training by giving the kids ice cream. Kirk sits down at the table with them and for a couple minutes is doing all right pumping them for information, but pushes it too far; they get up and start playing again, and Kirk finally packs them all off to bed. Back in their quarters, they join hands, circle, and summon their friend the “friendly angel,” whose name is Gorgan. The angel promises the kids unlimited power and hedonistic bliss in a grown-up-less universe if they can mindwhammy the crew into taking them to Markus 12, where there are about a million kids he hopes to recruit to his army of spoiled brats.   
  
The kids set about mindwhammying the crew into diverting to Markus 12. They trick Chekov and Sulu into changing course while believing they’re still orbiting Planet Cheapset; they go down to engineering and trick Scotty’s subordinates into doing the same, though they have to punch Scotty’s lights out in order to stop him from reversing the course. Meanwhile Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are down in the briefing room going through the tapes Dr. Starns made, which indicate that he was aware of some evil external force mind-controlling him and his crew. Spock tells of a legend of a marauding race that was confined on Planet Cheapset after the rest of that part of the galaxy got fed up with them; they were supposed to have been destroyed years ago but legend says that one of these beings survived and is waiting to be awakened so it can go marauding again. Kirk decides to send a new security detachment down on Planet Cheapset so he can debrief the guys who’ve been down there. They beam two redshirts down to the planet surface…or so they think. When the first guard detail can’t be beamed up, Spock takes the console and discovers that hey, they’re not in orbit any more after all, and they’ve just beamed those two poor bastards into deep space. Ah well, at least they didn’t suffer.  
  
Kirk and Spock rush to the bridge, where the kids are whammying people right and left. The kids summon the Friendly Angel, who delivers a lengthy rant about how powerful he is and how they’re all gonna die moohoohahaha and disappears. Attempts to get Sulu to change course fail when Sulu starts seeing all kinds of pointy knives on the screen. Uhura won’t call Starfleet because she’s seen a terrifying reflection of herself as an old woman in the mirror she has up there on the console (WHY a mirror? Has that EVER been there?). Asked to send the message himself, Spock says, hey, why bother Starfleet? We’ve got everything under control here. Kirk, barely stopping himself from wailing, “Et tu, honey badger?” tries to give some instructions to a redshirt who cannot understand a word he’s saying. Spock snaps himself out of it just in time to see Kirk suddenly seized with anxiety about losing command. Spock hustles Kirk into a turbolift, where with great drama Kirk calms down and gets his shit together. They then try to take control of the ship, but are foiled by Scotty (now mindwhammied) and nearly arrested by Chekov and a couple redshirts. Kirk and Spock wipe the floor with the three of them, causing Tommy (the oldest kid, and the ringleader) to flee the scene.   
  
Kirk and Spock go back to the bridge. All the kids are there. Kirk has Spock play back a recording of the chant the kids use to summon the angel. The angel appears. Kirk shows the kids some video of them laughing and playing ball with their parents down on Planet Cheapset. Then he shows them footage of their dead parents. The kids start crying. As they bawl, Kirk starts spouting about how the kids can see now how ugly the Friendly Angel really is. The Friendly Angel’s face rots and his wig gets all mussed up and his voice is all distorted and finally he disappears. McCoy shows up, is pleased to see the children weeping since it means their natural grief has finally been released, and hustles them off the bridge while Kirk orders the ship to go back to Starbase 4. **The End.**  
  
So, it’s bad. That much I knew as a youth. On rewatch, from my so much more mature perspective… it’s still bad. But at least I can construct a more sophisticated castle of speculations about what went wrong and why.  
  
First, there’s the premise: Kirk vs. omnipotent children. Again. You would think that after “Charlie X,” “Miri,” “The Squire of Gothos,” and “The Changeling,” Roddenberry might think they had exhausted the possibilities of this scenario. But it is a classic; and you know, as much crap as we 21st-century parents are taking right now for turning our children into spoiled little hellions, it would appear based on the evidence of _Star Trek_ and _The Twilight Zone_ that the rot set in a lot earlier. Obviously we’re not the first generation of American parents to feel like our children are controlling our lives, or to fear that by catering to their needs we will annihilate ourselves.   
  
In “Miri,” the children’s nastiness is explained by the fact that all the human adults in the vicinity have been wiped out and they’ve had to fend for themselves Lord-of-the-Flies style. Charlie X has also lost his human parents and been raised by a race of energy beings who have no idea how human sensations or emotions work. In “And the Children Shall Lead” the kids don’t have any excuse; they have loving parents who frolic with them most devotedly until the kids are seduced away from them by the “Friendly Angel,” who promises that they will never have to obey grown-ups (except for the Friendly Angel) ever again. So the childology of this particular episode is that the child’s resistance to parental control is so strong, and his desires so uncontainable, that he will literally dance upon the graves of his parents (which these children do, knocking over the cheesy metal United Federation of Planets grave marker Kirk has stuck in the dirt) to get more ice cream, playtime, and anarchy. This is childhood Ray Bradbury style…up to a point. In “The Veldt,” there is some suggestion that the house itself may be possessing the children; but it’s also implied that the fantasy of killing their parents comes from the kids, and that the house merely realizes it for them. Star Trek doesn’t have the guts to go all the way, and pulls back from the brink in order to get us a ‘happy’ ending (parents remain dead, after all). The children’s total lack of concern for their parents is recognized by Kirk as fundamentally unnatural  and treated by McCoy as pathological. Kirk’s solution—showing them the images of their parents when they were alive, followed by the footage of their corpses—banks on there being an essential love for their parents underneath their lusts for power, candy, and leisure time.  
  
“And the Children Shall Lead” resonates with the critiques of contemporary American parenting that are now making the rounds, in that it suggests that showering children with love and devotion inspires, not answering love and devotion, but selfishness and greed and contempt. Having raised my own little beastie for five years now, I will say this: the amount of effort you expend in making your children understand that they are loved unconditionally is worth it in terms of what it does for them. And they do love you back. They respond to genuine pain with a compassion in which there sincere desire to make everything all right is juxtaposed in heartbreaking fashion with their limited ability to understand what’s wrong. What is hard for grown-ups to understand—and here I include not just parents, but contemporary child development experts—is that their loving you has absolutely nothing to do with their willingness to obey you. We have a hard time getting over the idea that if we treat our children right, they will treat us right—because that’s how it’s supposed to work in adult relationships. But in most adult relationships, love is conditional; if you treat an adult like crap, that adult will usually break off the relationship as long as s/he is free to do so. (Obviously a lot of women stay in romantic/sexual/marital relationships where they are treated like crap, but that’s a patriarchy thing.) Your love will motivate compliance only if your child believes it can be withdrawn; but parental love is supposed to be unconditional. Once your child figures out that s/he cannot lose your love by misbehaving, you must rely on other means of control, most of which are either Pavlovian or Skinnerian. The increasingly popular new method of speaking to your children calmly and rationally about the benefits of making the right choices is, in my opinion, bullshit, at least as regards the five-and-under crowd. You try that shit out on a 3 year old and she will EAT YOU.  
  
But all this is beside the point, because “And the Children Shall Lead” is not really about children at all. Its characterization of the children is one-dimensional and clichéd and the extremely poor quality of the children’s acting is just about worthy of the script. (When they break down in tears you can almost see someone behind the camera waving freshly-cut onions in their direction.) The episode appears to want to be a parable about evil and how it spreads. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you scratch the surface you hit another Holocaust allegory. During the briefing scene there is much talk of how evil can’t survive without followers; and the fact that the Friendly Angel targets children who then turn on their parents evokes all the chilling tales of Hitler youths turning their parents in to the Party (this phenomenon is referenced in “Patterns of Force” as well). These allegorical ambitions are very ill-concealed and they render the episode unbearably didactic. There is way too much overt discussion of Good and Evil, and too much rhetorical posturing on both sides. It’s worst in the climactic scene on the bridge, which is basically a shouting match between Kirk and the Friendly Angel in which the FA chortles about how weak humans are and how the good/kind/gentle are always “too late” to stop the spread of evil, and Kirk says we are not either so sucks to you.   
  
The preference for rhetoric over action also sends the plot straight into the toilet. Lakso is so concerned to engineer that face-off on the bridge that he ignores plenty of reasonable strategies that could have neutralized the Friendly Angel before it ever got to that point. Kirk, for instance, allows the children onto the bridge, and when Tommy asks if he can stay behind when Kirk leaves, he says yes. WTF? Why would children EVER be allowed onto the bridge of a starship? (And if they banned adolescents, too, we’d have been spared Wesley.) Kirk and Spock watch the children do their mind-control and summon their angel without attempting to intervene; they try to snap the officers out of it but it apparently doesn’t occur to anyone to try to neutralize the children. It would have taken about 30 seconds to establish some bullshit reason as to why they can’t just tackle the kids and put them out of commission; but this is never done, and the result is that you spend the whole episode just itching to see Spock sneak up and nerve-pinch one of the little bastards. And what’s to stop McCoy from slipping into their quarters while they’re napping and sedating the whole lot of them? But Lasko seems to have conceived of McCoy as a specialist in child psychology who is useless in any other capacity. All McCoy ever does is talk about the kids’ psychological trauma, and once he’s reiterated his diagnosis and Kirk tells him he respects it but he’s putting the safety of the ship first, McCoy exits the briefing room and does not reappear until after the resolution. That makes no sense either from a plotting or a characterization standpoint; there’s no way that Kirk, once he figures out that he’s lost the bridge crew, wouldn’t try to find and team up with McCoy. But Lakso doesn’t want evil defeated by practical means; he wants it to be defeated by the sheer power of goodness and light as activated by cheesy declamations, and Kirk, as Our Hero, is the only one who can do that.   
  
And here’s the second major problem: bad as the script is, the production is worse.  
  
Planet Cheapset has to be the lamest alien environment yet realized on this show; it’s a few fake rock formations in a claustrophobic space whose “sky” is obviously a cyclorama just as the “ground” is obviously a floor. That’s kind of a scar, but it doesn’t undermine the episode’s plot. Casting Melvin Belli as the Friendly Angel is another story.  
  
Belli was not an actor but a celebrity lawyer who had recently defended Jack Ruby, the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald (who was, I point out for the young ‘uns, the man who shot JFK). IMDB informs me that Belli was on TV a lot in the 60s and 70s, often as himself but sometimes in guest roles on weekly TV shows. How he got himself into this one I do not know. While I wait to be enlightened by more hard-core fans, I choose to believe that Belli got Roddenberry out of a DUI charge, or maybe posted bail for him after he was picked up for soliciting prostitutes, or managed to take care of some actress who was blackmailing him, and Roddenberry repaid him by giving him some free advertising and his son Cesar his first acting gig (Cesar Belli plays one of the kids). It’s also possible that the producers thought that casting Belli as the silver-tongued demon capable of persuading children to hate their parents would be a stroke of meta genius, since he was moderately famous at the time and since we all know that all lawyers are pure evil. Well, maybe; but it was also a stroke of FAIL.  
  
From Kirk’s repeated exhortations to the children to notice how “ugly” the Friendly Angel becomes during the final confrontation, we can assume that they initially perceived the Friendly Angel as beautiful. The idea that the Devil lurks behind a beautiful face is an old one, but it has a modern analogue in the Nazi glorification of physical fitness and Aryan ‘beauty.’ The fact that the angel becomes ‘ugly’ once the kids stop buying his bullshit is the _coup de sledgehammer_ that drives home the idea that an evil genius cannot operate without the willing cooperation of the masses. For any of that to work, though, the Friendly Angel has to be beautiful to begin with. Thanks to Belli, however, the Friendly Angel initially manifests as the jowly head and neck of a middle-aged man sticking out of a pleated tinfoil bag whose only virtue is that it conceals his uncomely middle-aged body. Gorgan thus looks like an early prototype for a Jabba the Hutt Christmas ornament, and his voice sounds like the garglings of Fafner’s intestines. There’s no help coming from the acting department, because Belli doesn’t so much deliver his lines as declaim them.    
  
Since the Friendly Angel is never pretty, the only way to make him “ugly” is to actually turn him into a rotting corpse. Watching Gorgan’s face rot is pretty nasty. Sadly, however, the tinfoil bag remains intact; and when you factor in the increasingly frighteous wig and the chortling of horrible dialogue, Gorgan’s final exit is even cheesier than the Wicked Witch of the West’s. On the TOS Ridiculous Alien Scale Gorgan definitely surpasses the Gorn. He may lag behind the mugato by just a whisker, but only because he doesn’t have any foam appendages.  
  
The really sad thing is that it’s possible—just possible—that until they cast actually saw this episode they might have thought it was OK. Since Gorgan is a special effect, he would have been shot separately and added in during the editing process. Imagine being Shatner, or Nimoy, or even one of the child actors, and sitting down to see this thing for the first time…and going, “Holy shit, I was reacting to THAT?”  
  
Because as bad as the script is, it isn’t until Gorgan’s added in that the shark is well and truly jumped. In the writing for the Enterprise grown-ups there are some bright spots. For once, for instance, the entire bridge crew (plus Nurse Chapel) is involved—though what Lakso has them doing is neither original nor imaginative. In the case of Nurse Chapel (babysitting), Uhura (terrified at the thought of losing her youth and beauty), and Sulu (again with the exotic pointy weapons), Lakso is clearly working from familiar stereotypes. Oddly enough, however, Lasko clears a hurdle that has tripped up many a better man: he manages to write a decent scene for Chekov.  
  
After Chekov arrives to arrest Kirk and Spock, Kirk tries to get him to realize that he’s being mindforced. Kirk keeps ordering Chekov to disobey the order he believes he’s just gotten from Starfleet Command, and Chekov—who is torn between his sense that something is in fact wrong here and his compulsion to obey what he believes is an order from a higher authority than Kirk—keeps yelling back at him, and the tensions keeps ratcheting up until Spock finally kicks the phaser out of Chekov’s hand. It’s perhaps the only time I’ve seen Chekov used as something other than a joke, and it provides a moment of real drama. Similarly, Scotty’s showdown with the engineering minions when he first realizes they’re off course gives him some of his best moments since “Trouble with Tribbles.” (“You’re losing control of yourself, sir,” says a minion. “Not yet,” replies Scotty, and tackles him.) Spock and Kirk’s scene in the turbolift is hampered by the crappy dialogue and by Shatner’s more than usually push-button emoting, but their physicality gives it a nice charge. Spock seems to know that touching Kirk will help him get over his anxiety, and in fact the turning point comes after Kirk grabs Spock by the throat. Hanging onto Spock’s neck and well within kissing distance, Kirk looks into Spock’s eyes and repeats, “I’ve got command…I’ve got command…” until he stops hyperventilating. Of course Lasko has to ruin this moment by giving Kirk a load of crap about how his “beast” is now under control. But still, what all this shows you is that the idea of Kirk trying to combat a subtle force capable of mind-controlling his crew has some dramatic potential. And that the regular cast members are now capable of spinning crap into gold.  
  
They cannot, however, do a fucking thing about Gorgan. So all the good work the cast and director put in is brought down in flames by a gratuitous bit of stunt casting.   
  
Up next: Hooray! Diana Muldaur is back!


	59. IS THERE IN TRUTH NO BEAUTY?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another [Ralph Senensky](http://www.senensky.com) gem featuring Diana Muldaur, written by a badass librarian whose use of Shakespeare, though sparing, is 100X more effective than anything that happens in "Conscience of the King."
> 
> Senensky's post about how this one got made is fascinating reading and highly entertaining. Among other things it reveals that the major screwup with the final scene was introduced during the editing process, which Senensky had no control over because by the time that was happening he'd already been fired for going over time on "The Tholian Web."

**STARDATE: July 7, 2012**

**IS THERE IN TRUTH NO BEAUTY?**  
 **By Jean Lisette Aroeste**  
  
Every rose has its thorns. This one maybe has a few more than most…but it still smells pretty sweet. Especially after the stench Gorgan left behind.  
  
 **The Summary** : The Enterprise is preparing to transport a diplomat and its entourage from point A to point B. The twist is that the diplomat is a Medusan, and the Medusans are ‘formless’ beings whose “thoughts are the most sublime in the universe” but whose visual appearance is so hideous that any human being who catches sight of one immediately goes mad. (I’m just gonna assume you all know who Medusa was.) The Medusan ambassador, Kollos, therefore travels among humans in a hexagonal carrying case that shields his dreadful aspect from passersby, interacting with humans through Dr. Miranda Jones, a human telepath who spent her formative years on Vulcan learning special fucking badass Vulcan mental discipline. The Medusans, in addition to being telepathic, are apparently kick-ass interstellar navigators, and there is some proposal afoot to make it possible for Medusans to help out in some navigational capacity with the Federation, though obviously there are some practical difficulties that will need to be overcome. Laurence Marvick, one of the engineers who helped design the Enterprise, is in the party too.  
  
Vulcans, thanks to their special badass Vulcan mental discipline, are able to look upon the Medusans unscathed as long as they remember to wear a special visor made of cardboard and red cellophane which renders them in 3-D no you didn’t hear me say that I’ll start again. Spock therefore puts on his trusty visor and does the work of beaming them all aboard and accompanying Kollos’s box and Dr. Jones—let’s call her Miranda, everyone does—to their quarters. Miranda notes that Spock had been offered the job of Kollos’s interpreter/companion/whatever but turned it down because, he says, “my life is here.” It is established that Miranda is a tad possessive of Kollos, with whom she hopes soon to form a complete “mindlink” which will allow them to operate as one.  
  
A state dinner in Kirk’s quarters gets another wearing out of the senior officers’ dress uniforms. Kirk’s efforts at gallantry make everyone most uncomfortable, though the longest awkward pause turns out to be because Miranda has perceived that someone nearby is thinking of murder. She doesn’t know who, though one might guess it would be herself; putting up with what’s coming out of the mouths of Kirk and McCoy would make any professional woman homicidal, and instead of turning to Spock for relief she’s openly antagonistic to him. The party breaks up. Larry, as Marvick is familiarly known, drops by Miranda’s room late at night and we discover that he’s madly in love with Miranda and desperately wants her to give up her assignment with Kollos and stay with him. She realizes, as she’s brushing him off, that he’s the one who was thinking of murder. Marvick rushes out, finds Kollos’s quarters, and attempts to phaser him—which is stupid, because as soon as the box opens and the crazy lights start flashing Marvick goes MAAAAAAAD!!!! Dropping the phaser, he rushes to Engineering, where Scotty is pleased to turn over the controls to him; after flinging the Enterprise through the barrier at the edge of the galaxy, Marvick is finally subdued by Kirk et al. Miranda attempts to help Marvick telepathically while he goes doolally all over Engineering; but despite her efforts Marvick collapses and dies.  
  
Now they have to figure out how to get back on course, and they can’t do it without the help of Kollos (remember the Medusans are awesome interstellar navigators). Spock proposes that he attempt a “fusion” of his mind with Kollos’s so that Kollos could pilot the ship through him. He explains that Miranda is jealous of Kollos and will try to prevent this if she knows about it, so he tells Kirk that her mind needs to be otherwise engaged while he makes the attempt. Well, when you look up “provide a diversion” in Kirk’s playbook, there’s only one entry; so while Spock goes to get his visor, Kirk takes Miranda down to the botanical gardens and makes a play for her. Miranda is insufficiently diverted, and reads what’s going on. She, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy wind up arguing in the hallway outside of Kollos’s quarters about whether Spock can do this. She wants to fuse with Kollos and pilot the ship herself, at which point McCoy outs her as blind. Yes, it turns out she’s been finding her way around with the help of a net of sensors that she wears over her clothes; she can’t actually see, which explains how she survives contact with the Medusans. Miranda goes in to take this up with Kollos; Kollos evidently tells her to shut up and let Spock do it.  
  
So Spock goes behind the “protective screen” they have set up around Kollos’s box on the bridge, puts on his visor, and does the deed. Spock/Kollos comes out smilin’, charms the tunics off the bridge crew, and does an awesome job of getting the ship back to where it started from. Everyone is pleased. After a disquisition on what it’s like to be in a human body, Spock/Kollos heads back behind the screen to separate. Sulu, who is apparently the only person on the bridge with two brain cells to spare, notices that Spock has left his visor on the console. Kirk yells out a warning, but it’s too late; Spock staggers out all starey-eyed and twitchy, and it takes the entire bridge crew plus a phaser set to "stun" to subdue him.  
  
Miranda goes down to sickbay to try to help Spock recover. Kirk paces the hall outside, convincing himself that Miranda isn’t really trying because she hates Spock because she’s jealous of him. He busts into sickbay, where Miranda has taken off her sensor net and is standing by Spock’s bed. He tears into her, accusing her of wanting Spock to die and of being ugly inside what with the jealousy and the possessiveness and the whatnot. He eventually leaves, confessing to McCoy that upon mature consideration going ballistic on Miranda might not have been the smart move. Miranda grabs Spock’s head and goes in; he grabs hers; finally we see Spock stagger back out of sickbay, alive and apparently sane. Kirk goes in search of Miranda.  
  
Hours or days or something pass and they’re ready to say goodbye to Miranda and Kollos. They have made their mindmeld or mindlink or mindfusion or whatever and she bonds with Spock over the joy of knowing that kind of union with a Medusan. Kirk presents her with a red rose as a lovely parting gift. Spock puts on his visor and transports them down to the Medusans’ home planet…while Kirk, without any visor or anything, apparently watches, and does not go insane. **The End.**  
  
I could not find any information on Jean Lisette Aroeste on IMDB, so I looked her up on Memory Alpha. According to them, Aroeste was a librarian who had never written for TV before, and just sent the script in over the transom. Robert Justman read it, liked it, and shot it. She wrote one other episode (“All Our Yesterdays”) before, I suppose, going back to being a librarian. I went in search of this information because I found this episode fascinating.  
  
For one thing, it’s a welcome break from all the Hodgkin’s Law plots and from humanoid aliens in general. It’s the first time, if memory serves, that we see the Federation enter into diplomatic relations with a non-corporeal species (there have been many encounters with amorphous cloud creatures and ‘energy beings’ but they’ve all been first contacts). Though the Medusans still have to cope with human “prejudices”—more on that later—everyone is making an effort to be as enlightened as they can, and apart from Mavrick nobody seems to be afraid of Kollos or wish him ill. The plot gives Nimoy another chance to step out a little when Spock fuses with Kollos, who appears delighted with his new corporeal adventure. His interactions with the bridge crew are funny without being stupid; after gushing about Kirk’s long friendship with Spock, he says, “And Dr. McCoy! Also of long acquaintance,” and then moves on to Uhura:  
  
 **SPOCK/KOLLOS: And Uhura, whose name means freedom. She walks in beauty, like the night…**  
 **MCCOY: That’s not Spock.**  
 **SPOCK/KOLLOS: Does it surprise you that I have read Byron, Doctor?**  
 **MCCOY: (happily) THAT’S Spock.**  
  
Kollos’s meditation on the experience of being embodied is, of course, a nod to the many…MANY…episodes in which we’ve seen aliens take human form and be seduced by the delights of sensation. But Kollos, though he seems to enjoy embodiment, is more struck by the boundedness of corporeal form, and grieved by the “loneliness” that humans must experience, trapped inside their individual skulls. Kirk’s reaction to this speech—which is to insist, politely but firmly, that Kollos separate from Spock ASAP—is also a nice touch; one imagines that this Kirk might actually have a long-term memory and be thinking back to, say, “Return to Tomorrow.”  
  
Spock/Kollos’s interactions with Miranda, meanwhile, are subtle and unexpectedly tender, which is a relief when you consider what Miranda’s been putting up with from the corporeal men on this ship. He takes Miranda’s hand, and promises her that their union is not far in the future, acknowledging her disappointment but reassuring her that it’s temporary. That's right after this exchange:  
  
 **SPOCK/KOLLOS: Oh brave new world, that has such creatures in it!**  
 **MIRANDA: (tearing up) Tis new to thee.**  
  
Miranda, of course, is named after the heroine of Shakespeare’s _The Tempest_. The name “Miranda” means “to be wondered at” (same way “Amanda” means “to be loved”). In _The Tempest_ , it’s Miranda who does the “brave new world” line, because she is impressed by all the well-dressed courtiers who have just been revealed to her; and it’s Prospero who responds to her exclamation of wonder by cautioning her that this new world is not as shiny as it seems. Aroeste’s reversal of this exchange is smart and poignant; it’s Miranda who has been yearning all along to _see_ Kollos, knowing that she never can; and now Kollos is the one finally seeing her. Though she can’t see any of the people Kollos is looking at, she knows them well enough to have the authority to give him Prospero’s warning. But of course they both know they’re quoting the same familiar text, and so they are alluding not just to Shakespeare but to an intimacy which has, ironically, been at least temporarily broken by Kollos’s merging with Spock. Now that he’s in a human body, the fact that he can touch Miranda does not make up for the ways in which they are now more separated than ever before. The reversal also underlines for us an idea which has been offered to us over and over again, which is that Miranda really is the one to be wondered at, whereas the brave new world that Kollos is enjoying is a lot less brave—and even less new—when you’re a woman in it.  
  
Oh yeah. Remember how we all loved it that Captain HFV’s femininity was not made a huge issue of in “The Enterprise Incident”? Well, that totally doesn’t happen here. Miranda’s being a woman—a BEAUTIFUL woman yet, as if there is any other kind that matters to these jackasses—is a _huge_ deal.  
  
So, I mentioned that every rose has thorns. That’s perhaps because the thorniness of roses comes up so often in this episode that we can put a tune on it and call it a leitmotif. The most obvious referent is of course Miranda, who is perceived by the men around her as very beautiful but very prickly. She’d be, you know, more beautiful without the faux-hair snake that seems to be knotting itself around her scalp; but I suppose that’s meant to be an allusion to Medusa. Which is interesting to me, as [](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://lizaetal.livejournal.com/)**lizaetal** concocted a theory about Medusa while writing her masters’ thesis according to which Athena actually gave Medusa her snaky, petrifying powers in order to protect her from sexual violence, and Miranda’s vulnerability or lack thereof is of great concern to all the men in this episode. Her external demeanor is very cooooooooooool—almost Vulcanesque—and for some of the same reasons. As Miranda explains during the state dinner, being a telepath means being in constant danger of being overwhelmed by the thoughts and emotions of others; much of her training on Vulcan, she says, focused on helping her tune things out. Despite knowing this, all the human men around her are desperate to break through that cooooooooool exterior to the passionate “woman” that they’re so sure is lurking under the rational, professional, calm façade.  
  
The worst offender here is Larry, who seems to believe that the mere fact that he inhabits a male body entitles him to Miranda’s love. Not only that, he’s entitled to demand that she give up her career to be with him. Miranda insists that she was “honest” with him about the fact that she’s never loved him “the way you want me to”—we can infer from this that maybe they did have a prior relationship, though it’s never made explicit—but he can’t get past the idea that she’s dumped him for a guy who doesn’t even have a body and is mindshatteringly hideous to boot. After he forces a kiss on her that she doesn’t want and by which she is clearly unmoved, she realizes he’s the one thinking about murder, and at first assumes that she’s the target. Not a bad guess; he’s behaving in every way like a stalker with a history of domestic violence. When she offers to help him, he taunts her quite cruelly about her profession: “Now I know what a mere human male has to do to get a reaction out of you--make you think he's a patient. Great psychologist. Why don't you try being a woman for a change?” Insane Larry is even worse; he tries to strangle her and goes to his grave raving about how evil Miranda is, screaming, “Don’t love her! She’ll kill you if you love her!”  
  
She gets the same crap in a less coercive form from Kirk, who won’t shut up about how beautiful she is, and who, during that seduction in the garden, delivers an ostensibly disinterested lecture to Miranda about how the life of the mind is all very well, but she’s young and attractive and one day she’ll want to be with people who “look like” her and “what about love?” Kirk is disturbed by her dedication to Kollos in a more abstract way; it bothers him that someone as beautiful as she is should be wasting her life on “ugly” people—when after all she could be with someone pretty, like him! At the state dinner, Kirk acknowledges that the belief that what is good is beautiful and vice versa is “one of our oldest prejudices,” but he doesn’t seem at all interested in divesting himself of it. As Aroeste just barely stops herself from explicitly pointing out (you can totally see her itching to do it, and she does actually mention the Greek origins), this ‘prejudice’ ultimately derives from Platonic idealism, which presumes an analogy between a physical form and the ideal form of which it is an imperfect shadow. The German interpretation of Platonic idealism was popularized in English literature through the Romantics (John Keats, whose “Ode on a Grecian Urn” clearly inspired the episode’s title, being one of them, and George Gordon Lord “She Walks In Beauty” Byron being another). Anyway, Miranda and Mavrick both call Kirk and McCoy on buying into the idea that the beautiful is the truth is the good and vice versa, which is one of the foundational tenets of idealism (as Keats says in “Grecian Urn,” “Beauty is truth and truth beauty”). Miranda suggests to Kirk that the Medusans may be, not “too ugly to bear,” but “too beautiful to bear.” But when Kirk tackles Miranda down in sickbay, he’s all of a sudden become a realist: he’s determined to make Miranda understand that the truth is ugly—at least when it comes from her bitter jealous feminine heart.  
  
And this is one of the biggest thorns in the rose. In public, Miranda does a great job of turning this bullshit back on its slingers without doing anything obviously shrill or unsympathetic. She manages to rebuff Kirk’s seduction in the garden without making a scene; and the way she holds her own at the dinner party is a thing of beauty. When Kirk and McCoy, complaining that a woman as beautiful as Miranda should spend her life with such ugly creatures, say, “Will we allow it, gentlemen?” she asks how someone who loves life as much as McCoy does could dedicate his life to studying disease, asking, “Can we allow _that_ , gentlemen?” McCoy, realizing he’s been bested, changes the toast to wish her “whatever you want the most.” But the plot, to some extent, validates this bullshit by requiring Miranda to be just as jealous and crazy and irrational as Kirk et al. always presume women to be. When she’s alone with Kollos, Miranda acts like a controlling girlfriend; and we don’t know exactly what passes between them before she finally concedes that Spock’s doing the mindmeld, but we do hear a hysterical scream before she returns to the corridor. She is punished for her jealousy with that confrontation with Kirk down in sickbay, where she’s taken off her sensors and is, as Kirk puts it, “really blind” and therefore, as everyone always assumes, especially vulnerable. He’s the one who gets to make the truth about her, after all.  
  
(On edit: I believe that there was a scene cut out of the end of this episode in which it was established that it was her jealousy that was preventing her from making the mindlink with the Ambassador. I have no documentary evidence for this. Still, Spock's recovery scene ends very abruptly--Kirk says, "Miranda!" and goes looking for her, then there's a shot of an empty corridor, and then we've to an exterior shot of the two spaceships. In the farewell scene Miranda's dialogue implies that it was facing up to what Kirk said about her that enabled her to make the link. But all this is speculation, so we resume.)  
  
Ah yes, the blindness. In some ways, this episode is very forward-thinking—for Star Trek, but even by contemporary standards. For one thing, Aroeste is able to imagine using technology to compensate for a disability. Her sensor net is also, I should say, a creative and even beautiful imagination of futuristic technology, anticipating by many decades the phenomenon of interactive clothing which the “Meet the Future” exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry assures me is going to be the next big thing. So Aroeste’s imagination of disability in the future is very different from, for instance,  what you see in “The Menagerie,” where disability renders ordinary human existence nothing but endless pain and humiliation. Miranda, in fact, insists on the superiority of her sensor system to mere human vision. At the same time, however, Miranda’s blindness remains a handicap; it appears to set off some kind of spidey-sense in McCoy, who muses after the state dinner about what it is that makes her seem ‘vulnerable.’  
  
Compared to contemporary representations, this episode stands out in that, because of the sensor net, Miranda is not required to “act blind,” i.e., to perform the set of crude physical clichés that sighted viewers accept as conventional markers of blindness. Even in the sickbay scene when she’s “really blind,” Muldaur doesn’t pull out the old bag of tricks; she still makes eye contact with Kirk (usually only after hearing his voice) and there is a minimal amount of groping (rather oddly, it’s Spock who gropes Miranda by copping a feel of her ‘sensor net’ after McCoy outs her). That in itself is refreshing. But although Kirk (finally) gets why it is that Miranda considers “pity” the most dangerous and disgusting human emotion, we’re still given plenty of condescension and paternalism. McCoy outs her as blind precisely in order to force her to concede that her disability limits her--despite the fact that she has both technology and telepathy to assist her. That scene in the hall is pretty destructive to Miranda’s dignity; and Kirk’s characterization of Miranda as “ _really_ blind” without her sensors indicates that for him, being “really” blind means being helpless.  
  
Still, Miranda’s character is in many ways light-years ahead of what was out there in 1968; and I’d go so far as to say that I benefited from exposure to this episode back in the 1980s, since as far as I can recall it was the first time I’d encountered a fictional character whose blindness was not totally disabling. The scene in the flower 'garden' is particularly well-done. Kirk shows her the flowers, unaware of course that she can't see them; she says they're "lovely" and asks if she can touch them. The first one she examines closely doesn't have a scent, so he shows her the roses. A clueful viewer might pick up on the fact that she seems more interested in the flowers' other sensory properties than in their beauty; but because she is looking at what she's touching and smelling nobody's going to. When he starts talking about how romantic the setting is and how he wishes there were moonlight, you can start to sense her impatience building up, but of course you attribute it to her being annoyed at the seduction, not to her being bored with all this talk of creating visual effects that are irrelevant to her. Certainly Kirk doesn't pick up on anything; and it is a shock to him to discover that all that time she wasn't even able to see how roguishly handsome he is.  
  
Despite her crazycakes aspects, Miranda can legitimately be said to be, as Kirk says, “quite a woman,” and the script has all the male characters professing respect for her even as they condescend to her. Aroeste uses her erudition to enhance the episode instead of merely adorning it, and from the professional woman’s point of view, the episode has a happy ending: as McCoy points out, she gets ‘what she most wanted.’ While Kirk cannot stop himself from harassing her, he is kept at a safe distance—though what is going on in that final transporter room scene I do not profess to understand. After making such a big deal about clearing the transporter room for the beam in, how are we to interpret the fact that Kirk stands there and watches the beam-out, sans visor, sans special badass Vulcan mental discipline, sans anything? Can this really just be a continuity fuck-up? (If so, how come they remember to have Spock use the visor?) Did they want the conventional shot of him gazing after his departing love object du episode so badly that they undermined the entire premise to get it? Is he immune to Medusa madness because his heart is pure? Or is he so crazy already that he cannot be rendered insane?  
  
The other major thorn on this rose is the shameless flogging of the IDIC medallion. IDIC stands for “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations,” and it is supposed to be a sacred symbol of Vulcan belief. It is in fact a cheap piece of merchandise that Roddenberry hoped to sell to the fans, and it’s quite obvious that Spock is doing product placement. Not only does he wear it to the state dinner, where Miranda makes it the subject of an incredibly awkward exchange—it literally starts with her saying, “I couldn’t help noticing your Vulcan IDIC,” and Shatner is forced to point out that the IDIC is Vulcan's most "revered symbol"—but he wears the thing on a chain around his neck while he’s beaming her out at the end of the episode. Thanks, Gene. Once again, your touch raises boils on an otherwise lovely episode.  
  
At any rate, I’m certainly glad Aroeste threw this script over the transom. The show’s uncertain future no doubt warned a lot of writers away from it; but the bright side is that the producers were open to—some might say, desperate for—contributions from outside their established stable of writers. “Is There in Truth No Beauty” is, for all its flaws, another demonstration of Star Trek’s potential; and though Miranda is no Captain HFV, it’s another reminder that writing for women didn’t _have_ to be 100% fail.  
  
Up next: holy Christ. “Spectre of the Gun”? Are you people trying to kill me?


	60. SPECTER OF THE GUN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another "Lee Cronin" effort; but this time it's harder to know whether we're supposed to take it seriously. Heavy on the Chekov.

**STARDATE: July 10, 2012**

**SPECTER OF THE GUN**  
 **Written by Gene L. Coon as “Lee Cronin”**  
  
You don’t scare me none, pardner. I done seen some pretty rough customers walk into this dadblasted saloon, and believe me, you ain’t the ugliest.   
  
**The Summary:** The Enterprise is on its way to Melkotia with explicit orders to make contact with the Melkotians. So far they have made contact with a warning beacon which tells them telepathically (they figure this out because everyone hears the message in his or her own native language; it’s like a secular alien Pentecost) to go no further or else. Kirk tries the whole “we come in peace” thing but his overtures get no response; so they assume orbit and he, Spock, Scotty, Chekov (why, George Takei? What the hell else were you doing that week that was so goddamn important?) and McCoy beam down. First they encounter a foggy fog that the sensors weren’t showing; then they find out their toys don’t work. Just as you figure the three witches are gonna show up wailing “Caaaaptain Kiiiiiiiirk!”, from out of the mist appears the floating head of E. T.’s great-granddaddy, excuse me, a Melkotian, informing them that since Kirk is responsible for this invasion of Melkotian space, Kirk will choose “the pattern of your death.” Before you can say “Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man,” the storefronts of an “incomplete” Western town appear on the planet’s surface and their phasers turn into six-shooters. It soon becomes apparent that they are in some version of Tombstone, Arizona on the day of the shootout at the OK Corral in which the Earps killed the Clanton gang. Alas, the inhabitants who eventually emerge to interact with them make it clear that Kirk et al. are playing the Clanton gang, and that Kirk and friends will be shot full of lead at 5:00pm that evening.  
  
While Chekov, excuse me, “Billy Clayton,” enjoys making out with Sylvia, the saloon hussy who’s in love with him, the grown-ups try to figure out how to avoid their historically-mandated execution. Escape proves impossible. The Earps don’t want to hear any of Kirk’s protestations about how all they want is to be left alone. The sheriff is useless. Morgan Earp finds Chekov and Sylvia courtin’ out in the street and goads Chekov into fighting him. Morgan shoots Chekov in the chest; he is pronounced dead by McCoy. And there was much rejoicing. No, I mean it: Spock points out that in the actual shootout, Billy Clayton was the only member of the Clanton gang who actually survived. So Chekov’s death is a sign that things don’t _have_ to play out in this scenario the way they did in the history.  
  
Alas, our joy is short-lived; it’s 4:00 and Spock, McCoy, and Scotty are racing to build a knockout-gas canister which they can use to tranquilize the Earps and thus win without killing them. After some perfunctory conflict over Spock’s perceived failure to grieve for Chekov (dude, you don’t have to be Vulcan not to miss Chekov), they finish their tranquilizer bomb and Scotty offers to test it for them. It utterly fails to knock him out, even though he’s deliberately inhaling the smoke. Spock realizes at this point that the ordinary laws of physics are not functioning in this world, and that therefore it cannot possibly be real. Kirk decides to foil the Melkotian’s plot by not actually going to the OK Corral; but the Melkotians just boink them into it.   
  
Spock explains that all of this is a telepathically created illusion and that it will only have power over them if they believe that it’s real. Spock mind-melds with each of the grown-ups and impresses them with his conviction that the Earps and their guns and bullets are not real—they are merely ghosts, shadows, specters if you will—and cannot harm them. When the Earps show up, in fact, none of the bullets hit. Kirk, realizing he’s invulnerable, punches Morgan Earp’s lights out and pulls a gun on him, but at the last moment thinks better of it and throws the gun away. The Melkotians approve! They’re all back on the Enterprise, and Chekov is fine, and E.T.’s granddaddy is on the viewscreen inviting them to come on down and party now that they’ve proved that their intentions are peaceful. As preparations get underway, Spock has something to bring up with Kirk: it looked, to Spock, a lot like Kirk really wanted to kill that Earp. Kirk admits that he did. Spock says he wonders how humanity survived. Kirk says they overcame their urge to kill. Spock raises an eyebrow. The End.  
  
So, last time Coon submitted an episode under “Lee Cronin” it was a joke. It’s a little harder to know what to make of this one. It’s possible that Coon intended it either as a deliberate spoof a la “Spock’s Brain,” or as a comedy episode a la “Piece of the Action.” There is some comedy about the characters trying to cope with Western slang which recalls the shtick with the 20s argot in “Piece,” but it’s nowhere near as good; and as usual, weak comedy follows Chekov wherever he goes. A running gag about Scotty learning to love the nasty hooch they serve in that saloon is stereotypical (like everything else about Scotty) but sort of cute. Kirk’s attempts to explain the “misunderstanding” about their identity to the locals are also laughable, though not exactly ha-ha funny. But the omnipresent threat of death, and the amount of earnest dialogue devoted to the perennial problem of “humanity’s” (viz., men’s) violent tendencies, suggest that the episode was supposed to at least present itself as serious. Given Coon’s apparent interest in alternative history (as evidenced in “Bread and Circuses”), we can at least make a case for treating this as an attempt at a serious episode.  
  
The premise, of course, is ridiculous; but it’s not as ridiculous as, say, “Omega Glory,” or even “Bread and Circuses,” because “Tombstone,” instead of being the seventh fucking example of Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planetary Development, is explicitly framed as a constructed environment based on Kirk’s own brain. This puts it more in the neighborhood of “The Cage,” “Squire of Gothos,” and “Catspaw”—which, all right, it’s not exactly the high-rent district but it’s marginally less derelict than the Hodgkins Quarter, and it abuts the Shore Leave Resort, so the comps are a little higher. Spock’s big epiphany is a little frustrating in that it is blindingly obvious from the beginning that “Tombstone” is not “real.” In fact, the best thing about “Specter” from a production standpoint is the way it makes the cheesiness of the set a feature instead of a bug. The characters comment on the fact that the buildings are clearly not real—many of them consist of a façade and a door—and the combination of empty facades, red sky, and alien landscape (such as it is) is genuinely weird. The characters deduce the ‘reality’ of their universe from the fact that Morgan Earp shoots a guy dead on the street, and McCoy verifies that it is a real live dead body. One must ask: where do they think these other humans are coming from? Are the Melkotians down by the riverbank building figures out of clay and breathing life into them?   
  
However, if you look at the episodes to which “Specter” is related, their initial confusion makes some sense. In “Squire,” “Shore Leave,” and “Catspaw,” the world is ‘real’ in that the objects in it are material and are created by some machine which has the ability to instantaneously transform matter from one shape to another. This is why, in “Shore Leave,” McCoy’s reanimation has to be explained as a result of “repairs” carried out on his body below the planet surface, and why, in “Catspaw,” the dead redshirt remains dead after Sylvia (not Chekov’s Sylvia, Kodos’s Sylvia) is defeated. (Though of course there is no explicable cause of death for Crewman Jackson apart from ‘sympathetic magic,’ so obviously there is some fudging going on.) This is presumably the kind of fake world our heroes _thought_ they were operating in until Spock figured out that the objects in this universe didn’t behave like material objects. What Spock really figures out is not so much that their environment is not ‘real’ as that it is not material—in other words, that they are not in “Catspaw,” but in “The Cage,” and they have to plan accordingly.   
  
If you want to give Coon credit for this level of intentionality, you can also read “Specter” as a commentary on Star Trek’s genealogical relationship to the Western. As I may possibly have had occasion to mention before, Roddenberry pitched Star Trek as “Wagon Train to the stars,” and even the word _trek_ recalls a different set of white ‘pioneers’ in South Africa. Kirk interprets the choice of the OK Corral—something about which Spock seems to know more than Kirk does—as punishment not just for his own transgressions but for those of his ancestors: as a white American, he’s descended from the same race that pushed westward across the continent, and the violence of that project is now being visited upon him in return for his attempt to expand the Federation into Melkotian space. Spock at one points corrects Kirk’s usage of “America” by pointing out that he’s referring specifically to “the United States of America,” which appears to hint at the _real_ violence of that project, viz., the violent displacement of the indigenous people by white settlers. However, that violence is absent from the Melkotians’ scenario, in which Native Americans never appear; the violence Kirk has to cope with is strictly settler-on-settler. Kirk grasps on some level that, as in “Arena,” they are being tested to see how sincere their commitment to peace is; he assumes throughout that the instant any of them provokes violent confrontation their fate will be sealed. Among other things, the Melkotians force Kirk into what appears to be a traumatic confrontation of his own society’s lawless past. In a last-ditch effort, Kirk appeals to the town sheriff. He is genuinely horrified when the sheriff basically tells him to go ahead and kill the Earps and there will be no questions asked. Of course, the fact that he expresses his horror at this casual attitude toward extralegal violence by shaking the sheriff till his teeth rattle while screaming “I can’t just kill them!” is another indication that humans, i.e., men, are still kind of sorting out this nonviolence thing.  
  
Anyway, my point is that the title appears to come from what Spock says during the individual mindmelds—and boy, Scotty does not look pleased at the prospect of melding with Spock; he’s the only one of the grownups who hasn’t yet had the pleasure—about the guns and bullets being mere “ghosts” and “shadows.” (God…Plato’s _Republic_ two episodes running. And there’s more to come!) But the real ‘specter of the gun’ is the phaser. Kirk, while the mists are still swirling, draws his phaser and says they’re prepared to defend themselves; the camera zooms in and then zooms back out to the “Tombstone” set, and now Kirk’s holding a gun. The Enterprise and its ‘peaceful’ mission are specters of those original settlers, just as Star Trek itself is in its way a specter of the Western.   
  
Yeah, I hear you say, OK, this analytical shit, you groove on it, fine. But how does it hold up as an actual episode?  
  
Well, it’s watchable. That’s a step up from some Trek.  
  
Obviously this would have been better with Sulu instead of Chekov. Obviously, also, the premise remains ridiculous no matter how many layers of metacommentary you read into it. Perhaps if you are really into Westerns, it seems cool instead of ridiculous. I personally hate Westerns. One group of guys with guns trying to kill a different group of guys with guns bores the crap out of me. It doesn’t improve much when you replace the guns with blasters/phasers/rayguns/whatever. Swords…maybe.  
  
The characterization is hit or miss. I will buy Kirk acting like a jerk or a lunatic or even an idiot at times of great stress, but in “Specter” he demonstrates a naivete which seems very out of character. He tries, for way longer than is necessary or realistic, to convince the local inhabitants that they are travelers from outer space/the future and that he is not Ike Clanton but Captain James T. Kirk, and it’s just painful. There are, however, some nice Kirk moments. My favorite is when he asks if the knockout gas canister will really work, and McCoy and Spock tell him there’s nothing that could possibly go wrong, and Kirk just looks at them and says, “Everything else has gone wrong.” There’s just a whiff of “Trouble with Tribbles”, and then it’s gone. There are a few nice Kirk-Spock moments; when, having finally grasped the situation, Kirk realizes that there’s no way for McCoy and Scotty to really believe that those bullets are not real, he just says, “The Vulcan mindmeld?” and Spock is like, yeah, I’m on it. The mindmeld scene is nothing special compared to, say, the one in “Devil in the Dark;” but I’m a sucker for a mindmeld, even a mediocre one, and the way the whole team has to trust Spock’s special fucking badass Vulcan mental discipline to save their asses is a nice demonstration of how far they’ve all come as a crew and as a cast.   
  
But this just makes the whole “Spock’s not grieving” bitchfest feel wrong. There are two nice moments: the first when Spock tries to recall everyone to the task at hand and Kirk says look, be patient, it just takes us a little longer, and the second when, after Scotty and McCoy have been into him, Kirk starts to apologize for his asshole senior officers and Spock, with that world-weariness, says it’s all right, “they forget that I’m half human.” But otherwise, it just feels old; and it seems wrong for this point in the show. It’s season three, don’t these guys know Spock doesn’t grieve like a ‘normal’ human? Of course they do; they were both there for “Galileo Seven.” The final banter is interesting, but that’s mainly due to the actors’ nonverbal exchange: Kirk knows he’s kind of bullshitting, and Spock’s eyebrow knows he knows. There's even just the tiniest whisper of yeah, sure, we'll see whose violent tendencies are under control later tonight. As for the whole “we win by proving that we don’t kill people unless we have to” thing…well, again, it’s been done (“Arena”); and anyway, how many enlightenment points do you really get for refusing to use a gun that you know is not real on a guy that you also know is not real?   
  
Who knows, maybe this is an episode Coon wrote for Season One and decided it was too bad to shoot, and then Gene pulled it out of the circular file when things got desperate. At any rate, as I said re “Spock’s Brain,” Coon is a good enough writer that even his bad episodes are watchable and at least minimally entertaining—something which cannot be said about, say, “And The Children Shall Lead.”  
  
Up next: Klingons-a-poppin’ in “Day Of The Dove.”


	61. DAY OF THE DOVE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is probably the best anti-war episode TOS ever did. It has its issues but it remains close to my heart.

**STARDATE: July 12, 2012**

**DAY  OF THE DOVE**  
 **By Jerome Bixby**  
  
Oh man, Jerome…you were SO CLOSE! SO CLOSE to writing another great episode. If only you hadn’t listened to the thoughts planted in your brain by that giant spinning spectral alien that feeds on the human lust for cheese!  
  
 **The Summary:** Kirk, Chekov, McCoy, and an unusually long-lived redshirt respond to a distress call from a human colony on Planet We Didn’t Have Gas Money For Another Trip To Vasquez Rocks So We Stuck Some Pink Feathers In Fake Dirt And Called It Alien Flora. As Chekov is noting that there is no trace of a colony ever having been there, Sulu reports that a Klingon ship has just appeared and that it’s in distress. A party of Klingons materializes on Planet WDHGMFATTVRSWSSPFIFDACIAF, led by Captain Kang. The Klingons appear to have become swarthier since Season 2; but Kirk doesn’t have time to notice because Kang decks him and the Klingons take the whole landing party prisoner. Kang wants Kirk to beam them all aboard the Enterprise so he can commandeer it, since his own ship is toast; Kirk refuses; Chekov starts raving about how these Klingon Cossacks killed his brother Pyotr and attacks. Soon Chekov is being tortured. Kirk, alas, intervenes and tells Spock to beam them all up; but he presses the special secret button that tells Spock to activate Beam-Up Order Given At Phaserpoint Ruse #243. The landing party materializes on the pad; the Klingons remain in flux until they can get a security detail down to capture them. They beam aboard the surviving passengers from the Klingon ship, including Mara, who Kang introduces as his wife and his science officer. Kirk says, no shit, they let _you_ marry _your_ science officer? Where do I sign up?  
  
I’m sorry, I’ll start again.  
  
The Klingons are securely penned up in the crew lounge; the landing party’s back on board; everything seems fine except that Chekov is still ranting about those murdering Klingon bastards and McCoy seems to be starting to talk smack about Klingons too. In fact, everyone’s getting cranky. The normally unflappable Uhura pitches a fit about not being able to get through to Starfleet, after which the ship starts spontaneously doing Warp 9 and heading out of the galaxy. After a frustrated Kirk confronts Kang over this in the crew lounge and punches him in the head, every object in the room turns into a sword, dagger, or other pointy weapon. There’s a fight; the Klingons are loose; Kirk heads back to the bridge. Spock points out that it’s unlikely the Klingons have the capacity to transmute phasers into swords. Just as Kirk is starting to come around to the idea that some sinister third party is involved, Chekov starts waving his sword around and yelling about avenging Pyotr’s death. Only after he’s fled the bridge does Sulu point out that Chekov doesn’t even have a brother. Scotty finds himself a claymore with a real fancy pommel in the armoury, but it doesn’t help him against the Klingons, who seize Engineering. Spock detects an alien life force aboard “composed of pure energy.” Kirk and Spock realize they have to team up with Kang to defeat the alien; but Kang calls up to inform them that he’s shutting off life support to everywhere outside engineering.  
  
On the darkened bridge, Kirk sends Sulu out to try to get life support back up. Scotty busts in ranting about how they should have left those “fudge-faced goons” in oblivion, then starts in on honey badger. Honey badger decides to respond with more than an eyebrow; Kirk grabs Spock in mid-punch, calls Spock a “half-human” like that’s a _bad_ thing, and finally says OK everyone, this shit is fucked up. He and Spock work out that the alien is deliberately provoking them to fight each other by stoking their worst instincts. Life support comes back up; Sulu swears it’s not as a result of anything he did.  
  
Meanwhile, Chekov pounces on Mara in a corridor and is either just about to rape her or in the process when Kirk shows up, tears Chekov off her, and punches Chekov until Spock stops him. Kirk explains to Mara what’s going on and tries to get her to take him to Kang to talk truce; she won’t, so he sends her off with Spock. Kirk picks up the unconscious Chekov like a baby and carries him down to sickbay, where McCoy has finally gotten a fucking grip after discovering that the combat injuries are miraculously healing themselves. Kirk, Spock and Mara go in search of the alien; they find it, whirling away like a transparent glowing pinwheel. Spock notes that when Kirk gets into an altercation with a battle-crazed redshirt the alien’s energy increases. They now finally have it figured out: the alien is an emotion vampire that “exists on the hate of others” and is intentionally keeping them alive and fighting so it can have a constant supply of food.  
  
The new plan is to starve the beast by ceasing hostilities. Kang will not cooperate. In desperation Kirk threatens to execute Mara if Kang refuses to negotiate; he says hey, she knew the risks when she signed up. Mara, who is genuinely surprised that she hasn’t been killed, finally gets on board and offers to take them to Kang. They beam into engineering, where after great striving Kang is finally convinced. Kang and Kirk call a truce. The alien seems to be weakening; Spock suggests that generating “good spirits” might give it the coup de grace. Great! Kirk thinks. I knew there was a reason they gave a class on final banter at the Academy! Together Kirk, McCoy, Spock, and Kang manage to laugh that alien right out of their hair. It floats off into space as the Enterprise goes on its way. **The End.**  
  
In a comment on the “Is There In Truth No Beauty?” review, [](http://turmarion.livejournal.com/profile)[**turmarion**](http://turmarion.livejournal.com/) wondered aloud whether TV has really gotten any better since Star Trek. I’ve been thinking about that question. Obviously TV has become far more sophisticated, technically and formally, since 1968. One particularly interesting place to observe this in “Day of the Dove” is in the swordfights. The director and producers are obviously still thinking in theatrical rather than filmic terms. What I mean is that the combat is done as if it were going to be observed continuously by a live audience seated some distance away from the actors. The editing is for narrative rather than illusionistic purposes and there are no effects used in the combat sequences that could not be used in a stage performance. There is no attempt to represent wounds except through the actors’ reactions. There is no blood. Nobody even gets their uniform torn. The whole illusion has to be generated by the actors, who alas often undermine it unintentionally. Because the alien doesn’t think to create scabbards for any of these swords, the actors are constantly playing with their naked weapons, and they seem to have trouble remembering that these things are supposed to have sharp edges. If this episode were shot today, it would be approached in film terms, with a lot more editing and SFX work done to make it look more as if the swords were really sharp and people were really getting hacked and stabbed.  
  
And we would gain what, exactly?  
  
That is the question. The short answer is, greater sensational excitement, which insofar as it is always part of the entertainment value of any performance does matter. Violence can now be compelling in and of itself in a way that it never was or could be in original series _Star Trek_. Is it going too far to suggest that this may be one reason why American TV seems to have completely jettisoned the premise on which “Day of the Dove” is constructed? Which would be that violence is, you know, bad—and more important, that it not only should but could be stopped.  
  
Sure, the ever-expanding fleet of crime shows relies on the idea that violence against the innocent is bad. Violence against the guilty, though—that’s AWESOME. The rot was certainly noticeable by the 1980s, when “The A-Team” made action comedy a thing. Even in “The A-Team,” though—in which the entire plot always revolved around some campaign of violence organized against some group of baddies—it was considered necessary to show that the people that Face, Mr. T, Murdock, and Hannibal were beating up and blowing up didn’t actually die. Shatner got caught up in this via his ‘80s cop drama “T. J. Hooker,” in which his character seemed to have a strong urge toward the unnecessary use of force; but again, in “T. J. Hooker,” they always showed Hooker drawing back from the brink at the last moment. (Yeah. I watched a little “T. J. Hooker.” What? You want a piece of me? Do you, punk?) There’s no going back now; since “24,” if you’re the good guy in an American action drama, you can do whatever you fuckin’ want to the other side. I thought for a while “Lie To Me” might be the show to take us back to the other side—you know, the land where torture is always and everywhere wrong—but by season two that hope was dashed. And there are plenty of ideological, geopolitical, and cultural shifts to account for all this, but maybe, just maybe, some of it has to do with the fact that a lot of creativity and ingenuity has been put into making televised and filmic violence intense, absorbing, even at times beautiful—in other words, pleasurable.  
  
Or maybe not. But my point is that one of the reasons that Star Trek had a more powerful effect on me than any other show that I watched at any point in my life is that it was in fact generally committed to the idea that violence and war were evils, and that progress depended on eliminating or at least greatly diminishing them. The fact that this commitment was structurally compromised by the Enterprise’s status as a military vessel, and by all kinds of other desires and generic pollutions and genderfail and racefail and xenofail, is ultimately one of the things that makes it compelling. It’s not exactly that anything about Star Trek is realistic. But the way these extremely flawed people keep getting back up and setting their sights on the idealistic goal despite all the obstacles and all the fail is ‘real,’ to me anyway. Real in the sense that it could maybe be a model; and by God it has been. I borrowed from a lot of Star Trek in my adult writing, often without realizing that I’d done it. “Day of the Dove” is an episode from which I borrowed with conscious intent; but also unconsciously. Obviously the spirits in [the WOFverse](http://www.plaidder.com/wof) are in some sense founded on Star Trek’s corpus of energy beings, and this particularly nasty one was a model for the new breed of spirits in [Redemption](http://www.plaidder.com/wof/conten.htm). I knew that. It’s only on rewatch that I realized that the thing also kind of looks like a lurer…and that during that final confrontation in engineering, if you look at Kirk in just the right light, you can kind of see Theamh delivering the [Speech from the Dock](http://www.plaidder.com/wof/gwilna.htm).  
  
All this is to say that “Day of the Dove” shows Star Trek at its best and at its worst—sometimes simultaneously. Take the depiction of the Klingons, for example. On the one hand, the whole thrust of the episode is that both sides in this crypto-Cold War need to get over themselves and work together; but Bixby and the producers make sure that we know who the good guys are. Mara and McCoy both spout the same canned propaganda about the other side’s atrocities, which makes the point that hatred is generated through the same mechanisms no matter what the object is. However, the only people who are actually seen committing an atrocity are the Klingons; and the turning point comes when Mara realizes that the propaganda about _humans_ was lies, all lies, whereas the propaganda about Klingons…well, they do torture Chekov, and Kang seems quite willing to kill prisoners. The Federation, on the other hand, “doesn’t kill or mistreat its prisoners,” according to Kirk; and indeed in this episode they don’t. Boy, that’s crazy, isn’t it—that there used to be a time when treating your prisoners of war fairly was, like, important to people in this country?  
  
The swarthiness is kind of inexcusable, and they seem to embrace and celebrate bloodlust and imperialism. The cheapness of all this is replicated in the way the most extreme irrationality and savagery is projected onto Chekov, so that both the symbolic Russians and the literal Russian are portrayed as more naturally violent than everyone else. I mean, McCoy and Scotty both say some unforgivable shit; but neither of them tries to rape anyone, or has to deliver dialogue like this:  
  
 **CHEKOV: (to MARA, who he has backed against the wall) You don’t die…yet. You’re not human…but you’re wery beautiful. Wery, wery beautiful**.  
  
Man, I hate Weak Comedy Chekov, but I sure don’t like Racist Rapist Chekov any better. As in “The Enemy Within;” the desire to rape is once again linked to the desire for violence and nobody seems surprised that an alien who seems pretty much exclusively dedicated to promoting physical combat also provokes people to rape. As in “A Private Little War,” it’s unbelievably frustrating that Mara is not allowed to defend herself against this little bastard, especially since he drops his sword before delivering the above-cited immortal line. It should also be noted that this is one of the few episodes in which it is possible to conclude that Mara is actually getting raped before our very eyes. There is a close-up of her grunting in pain and gasping in horror as Chekov does something to her that we don’t see, and when Kirk shows up they’re pressed so tight together anything could be happening. When she shows up in engineering Kang looks at her and says “I see why the human didn’t kill you,” and he’s obviously commenting on some visible sign of her encounter with Chekov—it could be the fact that the top of her tunic is torn, but that doesn’t seem to be where he’s looking. It is also interesting that Spock stops Kirk from beating on Chekov by saying, “He’s not responsible.” Perhaps true; but nobody says that about any of the other alien-induced shit the guys do. McCoy feels it necessary, for instance, to apologize to Spock and Kirk for the genocidal hatred of Klingons that he displayed in their last conversation. Spock himself is clearly chastened by his brief access of “racial bigotry.” Kirk clearly feels remorse for going nuts on Chekov’s head, to the extent that he gathers Chekov’s fallen body tenderly in his arms. This, by the way, looks utterly ridiculous; Koenig can’t seem to decide whether he’s unconscious or not—his eyes are closed but his head isn’t flopping the way you’d think it would be—and Shatner is really too short to give this tableau heroic proportions. Bixby appears to be banking here on our seeing Chekov as a sympathetic and vulnerable youth toward whom we cherish tender feelings of pity and grief, instead of an annoying jerk with a ridiculous accent played by a nice man who was just not that good an actor.  
  
This is what I mean by “Day of the Dove” being the best and worst at the same time, though. What Kirk is saying—to himself and to the camera, I guess, but also to the unconscious Chekov—as he walks off to sickbay is part of one of the most compelling things about this episode, which is watching Kirk gradually comprehend and articulate the true horror of their situation. Kirk is all right while he’s focused on the tactical problems at hand, of which there are plenty. But once he realizes that they’re being played by the alien, he get more and more unsettled as he starts to look at the big picture. The first real turn of the screw is the fight between Kirk, Spock, and Scotty on the darkened bridge, which is pretty intense. Seeing honey badger finally start to unload about how much of a pain in the ass it is to serve among humans rattles Kirk good; but hearing himself race-bait Spock—this time, without any strategic excuse—is a much stronger shock to his system. It catapults him, in fact, into a completely different perspective on both this specific situation and war itself:  
  
 **SCOTTY: But this is war!  
  
KIRK: There isn’t any war!...Or is there?  
  
SCOTTY: Have we forgotten even how to defend ourselves--  
  
KIRK: Scotty. What’s happening to us? We’ve been trained to think in other terms than war. We’ve been trained to fight its causes if necessary. Then why are we behaving like a group of savages? Look at me. Look at me! Two forces aboard this ship, each of them equally armed…Has a war been staged for us, complete with weapons, and ideology, and patriotic drumbeating, even…Spock…even race hatred?  
  
SPOCK: Recent events would seem to be directed toward a magnification of the basic hostilities between humans and Klingons. Apparently it is by design that we fight. We seem to be pawns.  
  
KIRK: But what’s the game?**  
  
For one brief shining moment Kirk understands that war is not _just_ about hatred; that hatred, in fact, is merely one part of a material and ideological war engine, all elements of which can be manipulated as easily as the “savage” feelings that feed the alien. The discovery of that interfering third party is already starting to change Kirk’s understanding of what war actually is and why it happens. (The fact that Kirk actually puts his hands on Spock’s shoulders, looks deep into his eyes, and says Spock’s name before mentioning “race hatred” is—in addition to some excellent slash fuel—an unusually overt acknowledgment of the status Spock has always had as the character through whom the really interesting stuff about race is worked out.)  
  
The next major epiphany comes as Kirk realizes that in addition to deliberately prolonging the conflict, the alien is deliberately keeping them alive…perhaps indefinitely. This is what’s eating Kirk as he carries Chekov off to sickbay: the fear that the war they’re now fighting will go on _for ever_. In other words, Kirk has grasped the concept of permanent war…and it opens up an abyss of existential terror. Confronting the idea that war can be maintained in the absence of any rational pretext or concrete goal—that as a soldier he can be put through an eternity of this shit purely for the benefit of some super-powerful parasite—almost seems to radicalize him. When he finally gets through to Kang down in engineering, it’s not by appealing to peace as an ideal. What he does is communicate his newfound understanding of their intolerable position as soldiers who are compelled to fight a war for the benefit of a parasite.  Throwing his sword away in the general direction of the alien, Kirk faces Kang unarmed and tells him to go ahead:  
  
 **KIRK: All right…all right. In the heart, in the head, I won’t stay dead. Next time I’ll do the same to you—I’ll kill you. And it goes on, and on, the good old game of war, pawn against pawn, stopping the “bad guys,” while somewhere some thing sits back and laughs, and starts it all over again.**  
...  
KIRK: Be a pawn. Be a toy. Be a good soldier that never questions orders.  
  
That’s what Kang finally responds to—the idea that to be a “good soldier” is, under these conditions, to be a patsy. The point that it’s a daily struggle for humans to control their savage drives has been made plenty of times on this show already. But this idea of war as something soldiers are basically conned into doing to each other for other people’s profit…that’s new. This is as far left as Kirk’s ever been, and that’s probably why it struck a chord with me back then, though at the time I would have had no idea why.  
  
And then Bixby has to push it too far…and everyone drowns in a big vat of cheese. The attack of “good spirits” that chases the alien off the ship is nearly as hard to take as Scrooge’s ‘conversion’ in “A Christmas Carol,” partly because the naive optimism that’s cranking out this cheez whiz is just so painfully wrong. Kirk basically tells the alien that they’re on to it now, and it should leave because now they’re “ready” for its bullshit and it’ll never work again. Yeah. Sure. This episode, “And the Children Shall Lead,” and “Specter of the Gun” all make the same tragic mistake by assuming that simply _knowing_ that you’re being manipulated is enough to free you from manipulation. Wrong. We know advertising is lies but it still works. We know politicians lie cheat and steal but they still control us. We know we are fed all kinds of overt and covert propaganda but it affects our behavior anyhow. So all this smiling as you tell the evil war profiteer to “get off my ship”…there we make the transition from “crude but effective” to “crude and laughable.” “Day of the Dove” spends a lot of time kind of hovering over that boundary—as, for instance, in the scene where Kirk and Mara decide to trust each other. But it’s not till those final two minutes that the cheese swells from a trickle to a flood.  
  
Apart from that, the biggest complaint I have to make about this episode—apart from the fact that it bugs me to know Gene Roddenberry once again got to turn the Enterprise into a pirate ship—has to do with missed opportunities. Here’s an episode which actually has Sulu in it and which is stuffed full of combat scenes…and Sulu doesn’t even get to use his sword! WTF is that? His big moment is karate-chopping a Klingon on the shoulder. Takei paid for those frickin’ fencing lessons, man, put them to use! What is the MATTER with you?  
  
The other missed opportunity is Uhura. Those of you who doubt me when I say that these “human” urges toward violence are in fact (within the Star Trek universe) exclusively masculine, I offer as exhibit A Uhura’s possessed-by-the-alien moment, in which instead of getting belligerent she gets frustrated and over-wrought. She suggests that maybe the Klingons are behind it, but it sure never occurs to her to grab one of these pointy things and go after them. It’s a shame, especially since Bixby did such good work for Uhura and Sulu both in “Mirror Mirror,” but Uhura is so not on the radar screen this time that in one key scene she literally disappears. After life support to the bridge is cut, the next scene starts with Kirk dictating what he figures will be his last captain’s log and handing it to Uhura. That’s when Scotty busts in with the “fudge-faced” comments and starts the three-way fight. By all the laws of continuity, Uhura should be on the bridge for this. But she walks out of shot—not toward the exit, either—and the next time her station is visible, some blonde chick is sitting in her chair. Blonde chick gets up and walks out midway through the conversation. WTF did Uhura go? OK, she’s only a lieutenant, but she is no shrinking violet and you would think she might have something to say about Scott’s “fudge-faced” crack, or on the topic of race hatred in general. I’d have been very interested to see her contribution to this scene. But it unfolds as if she’s not even there.  
  
This episode seems to me to mark a turning point in the Trekverse in that we get our first indications that the Klingons have a culture. It’s a crazy barbaric culture; but Kirk mentions that they have a “dueling tradition,” and these are the first Klingons to throw around those pithy proverbs that we’ve all become so fond of from later incarnations of Trek. These include “Four thousand throats can be cut in one night by a running man” and “Only a fool fights in a burning house.” Mara gives us a little context for the Klingons’ empire building by claiming that their planets are “poor” and they need to look elsewhere for resources to survive. The ending, in which Kang winds up laughing along with the Enterprise officers while slapping Kirk on the back, seems to be hinting at the possibility of rapprochement. Kang is still hostile and kind of bloodthirsty—his way of driving the alien off with “good spirits” is to say, “We need no urging to hate humans!”—but this is another example of simultaneous best and worst. The characterization of the Klingons remains stereotyped and racist. But in a way the resolution means more _because_ the Klingons are not ‘good.’ The whole point is that you don’t have to _be_ good in order to do something good; that you don’t have to be noble, or heroic, or even decent in order to pull the plug on permanent war. It’s true in less obvious terms for the human characters too; they’ve all done some ugly on the way to this resolution, and we know the ugly’s still there, but they’re willing to take some risks out of the hope that there might be another fucking way. And this is a valuable idea. The idea that yeah, there are no heroes, nothing is noble, perfection is incompatible with human existence, so how about we stop expecting heroes to show up and just start making things better ourselves. That you do not have to be noble in order to strive toward the good. That “good” exists—even as a possibility, even as an aspirational goal—and has meaning. And I think the only way I can really understand the amount of effort I keep putting into these reviews is as some way of resurrecting these ideas, which have since about 2000 appeared to me to be dead. Which is a stupid goal to have, since I’m sure nobody under 40 is reading these episode reviews anyway; but hey, having no audience has never stopped me, so on I go.  
  
So yeah, with all the flaws, this one would still be a winner…if only you could lop off everything that happens after the truce is called.   
  
Up Next: For The World Is Hollow And Didn’t We Do This Plot Already?


	62. FOR THE WORLD IS HOLLOW AND I HAVE TOUCHED THE SKY

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Title is more interesting than the episode, despite the fact that based on the plot you'd think it would be a fabulous episode for McCoy.

**STARDATE: July 27, 2012**

**FOR THE WORLD IS HOLLOW AND I HAVE TOUCHED THE SKY**  
 **Written by Rik Vollaertz**  
  
When you play that game where you take a Star Trek episode title and replace one word in it with the word “hamster,” this one is always the winner.    
  
That is about all the win there is in this one.  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise discovers a “missile” heading its way (in the remastered version it’s a spread of several smaller missiles, but everyone in the episode refers to ‘them’ in the singular; either the Okuda team just thought a spread would be cooler, or there was some confusion on the original production team). It is handily dispatched by phaser fire in a brief scene which is the only one in which Uhura, Chekov, and Sulu appear. Kirk is called down to sickbay by Nurse Chapel for an emergency; an irate McCoy orders her out of the room before telling Kirk in the most roundabout way imaginable that he has diagnosed himself with xenopolycythemia. It sounds nasty; and indeed, it is a fatal disease with no known cure which McCoy expects will kill him within a year. Kirk, after wiring Starfleet to request a replacement, decides to find out where the missile came from and discovers a gigantic spaceship which has been disguised as an asteroid. After determining that the asteroid is on a collision course with a densely inhabited planet, Kirk and Spock head down to the transporter room to beam aboard the asteroid/ship and figure out a way to divert it. McCoy shows up and asks to go along. Kirk eventually relents and all three of them beam over.  
  
The inside of the asteroid has been set up like the surface of a planet. The purpose of the bizarre pinkish columnar things becomes clear when bathrobe-clad men carrying swords explode out of them, each wearing a hat that looks like some kind of coupling you’d find in the plumbing section at Home Depot. The bathrobe-wearers carry the day, but not before McCoy has locked gazes with Natira, the high priestess of the people of Yonada. She takes our heroes into their subterranean dwelling and into the Oracle Room, where she consults the Oracle about the strangers. The Oracle responds to Kirk’s suggestion that they come “in friendship” by shocking the bejeesus out of them. When they awaken on couches in a different room, McCoy is out cold for longer than the other two; Kirk explains to Spock about the xenopolycythemia. McCoy recovers; Kirk tells him that Spock knows. An old guy shows up with a handful of powder which he says sometimes helps people recover from the wrath of the oracle. He is just in the process of telling them that the world is hollow and he’s touched the sky when he convulses in pain and keels over dead.  
  
Natira returns with handmaidens bearing goblets and canapés (seriously, there are toothpicks sticking out of them). After clearing away the old man’s corpse, Natira kicks off the cocktail party. Spock and Kirk notice that Natira and McCoy seem sweet on each other, so they talk McCoy into getting Natira to stay behind with him while the two of them go looking for the asteroid’s control room.  Natira gets down to brass tacks right away: she wants McCoy to be her mate. McCoy says, but this is all so sudden. She says I know, isn’t that what makes it hot? Well, not exactly; but at any rate, she talks McCoy around to the idea while Kirk and Spock sneak into the oracle chamber. Spock has figured out that the inscriptions (they really are inscriptions this time) are “Febrini,” and they figure that this ship was built and stocked by the Febrini and sent into space when the Febrini sun went nova, in hopes that it would eventually reach a new planet they could colonize. They find an obelisk in the oracle room with a picture of the Febrini solar system on it, and have to hide behind it when Natira shows up to ask the oracle if it’s OK for her to marry McCoy. The oracle says fine, as long as he’s given an instrument of obedience. Natira’s exit somehow tips the oracle off, and it shocks Kirk and Spock something fierce. The indignant Natira wants to execute them, but when McCoy says he’s going to marry her and then asks her nicely to let them go back to their ship, she agrees. Kirk tries to get McCoy to come back with them, but he won’t. Kirk and Spock beam up.  
  
McCoy and Natira are mated, and McCoy gets his v-chip put in, and I guess it would all have been fine and dandy if Natira hadn’t shown him the sacred Book which contains all the knowledge of the Febrini and McCoy hadn’t called the Enterprise to tell Kirk that if they got a hold of the book Spock could probably make the course correction and save Yonada and that other planet and the Oracle hadn’t gotten pissed off and turned the Instrument of Obedience up to 11.  
  
Kirk and Spock beam back down; Spock removes the IOO from McCoy over the objections of Natira. While Spock ministers to McCoy, Kirk drags Natira behind a screen and forces her to…listen to his explanation of what the hell is really going on. Just listening to this speech lights up Natira’s IOO like a Christmas tree. Nevertheless, she is impressed enough to consult the Oracle, which turns out to be a mistake, since the Oracle doesn’t tolerate any of this free-thinking bullshit. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy show up in time to remove the IOO from Natira. The Oracle then tries to fry them by making the Oracle room really fucking hot, but Kirk and Spock find the book, get back to the engine room, and shut off the heat. While they’re making the corrections, McCoy and Natira are discussing their future. He wants her to come with him. She has to stay and lead her people to their new world. She wants him to stay, but he doesn’t really want to. I know, I know, this whole two-career thing, it sucks, doesn’t it?  
  
Well, on their way out of the engine room, Spock discovers a treasure trove containing the collected knowledge of the Febrini, which happens to contain a lot of medical knowledge. Sure enough, the three of them are soon back on the Enterprise and McCoy is back to normal and Kirk is saying that the Yonada should be making landfall in about a year and he’s sure he can arrange for the Enterprise to be in the vicinity in case McCoy wants to “thank the Febrini personally” for curing him. McCoy smiles. **The End.**  
  
Sometimes, when you’re making a new recipe, it doesn’t work and you can’t figure out why. You had the right ingredients, you followed the instructions, and it more or less looks like the picture, but it just doesn’t taste that good. Given the rather startling plot developments thrown at McCoy here—terminal illness, love, mutiny, marriage—you would expect this to be compelling. Sure, the episode’s main plot is crap—oh, look, another alien culture mistakenly worshipping a computer set up by the Old Ones, just like in “Return of the Archons” and “The Apple” and “Spock’s Brain”—but the main plot in “The Enterprise Incident” is cheez whiz too, and that doesn’t stop Spock and Captain HFV from catapulting that one to greatness. Kirk’s had his trail of spacebabes and his one or two true loves; Spock’s had his romances both real and fake; McCoy’s certainly due. And yet “For The World Is Hollow” just never gets off the ground. Why not?  
  
The script is no prize, but it’s basically competent. It’s true that there is some redundancy in the A plot, because Kirk and Spock are for some reason required to discuss the obvious fact that the inhabitants don’t know they’re on a spaceship several times. In fact, if this were a Lee Cronin episode one would be inclined to see the premise as a meta joke. Except for the episodes shot at Vasquez Rocks, all of the planet exteriors created for this show are actually interiors—and especially in Season 3, this is ALWAYS obvious to all but the most naïve viewers. It gets extra-obvious in Season 3, where they are limiting the ‘exteriors’ to one pretty small playing area. So the Yonadans, in taking their indoor landscape to be the surface of a real planet, are no more naïve or ignorant than any of the viewers who have been accepting these soundstage sets as “exteriors.” But it’s not a Lee Cronin episode, and so we must assume that Vollaertz thought this was a really cool idea and wanted to make trebly sure that everyone in the audience got it.  
  
As I said, though, “The Enterprise Incident” proves that a romance can create enough character development to lift a pedestrian plot out of the mire. But for that you need chemistry; and the fact is that McCoy has better chemistry with Spock and Kirk than he does with Natira. That’s not just an example of slashful thinking, either. He has better chemistry with Nurse Chapel than he does with Natira. In fact, I would go so far as to say that an episode in which Majel Barrett is doing the most effective acting is an episode with some major problems. The men are all so hung up on being stoic that Nurse Chapel is the only character who expresses any real emotion about McCoy’s impending death. You would, of course, expect Kirk and Spock to be less overtly upset—they are Men, after all—but this is exactly the type of situation in which Shatner and Nimoy have shown they can do a lot with very little. In this episode, though, they mostly don’t. The one moment at which you can start to see them working toward their usual standard is right after Kirk breaks it to Spock about McCoy’s illness. When McCoy tries to sit up, Spock puts a hand on his shoulder to help him; McCoy looks at the hand, then looks at Kirk, and Kirk fesses up: “Spock knows.” The scene in which McCoy refuses to beam up with them is also interesting, chiefly because it suggests that there’s some long-term anger and resentment simmering beneath the surface of his friendship with Kirk.  
  
But as far as selling us on a passionate attachment to Natira goes, Kelley is pretty much a total washout. It doesn’t help that Vollaertz does nothing to establish a basis for the relationship. Their eyes meet across a crowded donnybrook, and that’s all she wrote. When McCoy returns Natira’s fateful first glance, he doesn’t look like a man in love; he looks as if he’s just been zapped by a cattle prod. (Some would say the experiences are similar; but we’re not on Triskelion right now.) His first love scene with her is awkward. The dialogue indicates that he is attracted by Natira’s offer mainly because he’s lonely and dying and “needs a future;” so perhaps we cannot expect true love. Still, he does say he finds her attractive—and even that doesn’t really come through; apart from a few little self-contained smiles his affect is pretty flat, and for their first kiss he’s barely touching her. The scene in which he convinces her not to execute Kirk and Spock is particularly ineffective; there’s no sense of urgency on his part, and McCoy negotiates with Natira as if she’s a five-year-old and he’s trying to convince her not to throw sand. Once Kirk and Spock get into the engine room, McCoy has no further interest in remaining on Yonada until they get to the new planet. “Now more than ever,” he says, he wants to explore the galaxy, find new life, maybe find a cure for his disease. Why? As far as he knows he’s still terminal, and now both he and Natira are free of the IOOs, so why is staying on Yonada suddenly a non-starter? That particular transition is poorly motivated, and it’s not Kelley’s fault he can’t sell it. But overall, there is not a single moment in this episode where I believe that McCoy is in love with or even seriously attracted to Natira, and quite frankly some of that is DeForest Kelley choking on his first chance to be a leading man.   
  
Some of it can be laid at Natira’s doorstep; she’s lovely to look at, if you can ignore the Grecian Beehive hairdo, and she’s got grace and gravitas out the wazoo, but she’s way too serene for McCoy. Kelley’s always been at his best when sparring with someone; and it’s easier to see McCoy in a Beatrice & Benedict type relationship than it is to see him settling down like a turtle dove in harmony with his spiritually awakened helpmeet. The problem, of course, is that Star Trek being what it is they would inevitably push such a relationship past _Much Ado About Nothing_ into _Taming of the Shrew_ territory. And come to think of it, Eleen from “Friday’s Child” joins the long list of people who have better chemistry with McCoy than Natira does. Natira is defined by her priestess function and seems to have little personality apart from it; and she is apparently extremely impressionable, since she actually listens to Kirk’s crazy story about her world’s history and purpose even though it contradicts everything she knows and believes—and even though the choreography leading up to this monologue makes it look like he’s planning to attack her from another angle entirely. I suppose there is some kind of story about religion as a tool of totalitarian control being told here…but dude, I’ve already _seen_ “Return of the Archons.” I’m also pretty sure I’ve already seen the sacred book of the Febrini, only it was masquerading as the sacred book of the Iotians. Before that I think it was probably someone's family bible, or perhaps a dictionary.  
  
However, the general chemistry fail in this episode—as I said, even the Kirk/Spock/McCoy chemistry is not what it has been—could also be attributed to the fact that season 3 seems to have driven away most of the directors responsible for creating the show’s chemistry. Joseph Pevney, who directed “Amok Time,” “City on the Edge,” “Trouble with Tribbles,” and eleven other episodes ranging from good to bad to ugly (including “Catspaw” and “Wolf in the Fold”), isn’t credited with a single Season 3 episode. Marc Daniels, who directed fourteen episodes in seasons 1 & 2, apparently fled screaming after directing “Spock’s Brain.” Vincent McEveety, who brought us “Dagger of the Mind” and “Patterns of Force” along with several other less memorable episodes, rode into the sunset after directing “Specter of the Gun.” Ralph Senensky, who directed two of my favorite ‘hidden gems’ from the first two seasons (“Metamorphosis” and “Return to Tomorrow”) stuck around long enough to direct Season 3 hidden gem “Is There In Truth No Beauty?” and then bailed. The vast majority of Season 3 episodes were directed by people who were new to the show and therefore would have had no rapport with the actors and no institutional memory. “For The World Is Hollow” no doubt suffered from the fact that it was a one-off for both its writer and its director, neither of whom had any other connection to the show. Fontana would have done a better job writing the romance (and the havoc wreaked on the Eternal Triangle) and Pevney would undoubtedly have done a better job of getting nuance into all that stoic withholding of emotion. As it is...enh.


	63. THE THOLIAN WEB

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Though Herb Wallerstein got the director's credit on this episode, it was begun under [Ralph Senensky's](http://www.senensky.com) direction. He got fired halfway through for going over schedule. In his narrative about all this he blames the space suits, which did not have zippers; the boys had to be sewn into those things, which naturally slowed things down. But the real problem was that the executives were demanding a pace which was impossible to maintain without really damaging the quality of the show, and you can see the results in many of the episodes coming up.

**STARDATE: August 4, 2012**

**THE THOLIAN WEB**  
 **By Judy Burns and Chet Richards**  
  
In which we watch what may be the slowest and most static space battle ever.  
  
 **The Summary:**   
  
Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,  
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.  
Creepy space madness had done for the rest,  
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.  
The helmsman’s hands round the captain’s neck  
And redshirt bodies strewn on every deck  
And Kirk and Spock going “What the heck?”  
Down in sickbay  
Bones shakes his head;  
There’s corpses strapped  
Into biobeds  
And all the doctors and nurses dead,  
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.  
  
Ahem. Sorry. In case anyone cares, by the way, the extended-play version of _Treasure Island's_  “yo ho ho” pirate song is a poem by Young E. Allison called “Derelict” and it was included in an anthology called _The Best Loved Poems of the American People”_ which was published in 1936 and which my parents gave me when I was a youth. I still have large chunks of it memorized. But I digress.  
  
So, the Enterprise is searching for the Defiant, another Federation starship which disappeared three weeks previously. The region of space into which they have chased it is highly unstable because different universes keep phasing in and out, causing space itself to break up. They spot the Defiant, but it’s all green and glowing and Spock reports that it’s not showing up on sensors. Regardless, Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Chekov beam on over to a bridge that looks astonishingly like the bridge of the Enterprise, first taking the precaution of donning ‘space suits,’ which…OK, so a fencing team, a marching band, several rolls of mylar, and a bunch of hockey sticks all run into each other on a dark and stormy night, and when the dust clears, this is what emerges. Anyway, the main thing that differentiates the Defiant’s bridge from the Enterprise’s is that it’s littered with bodies, as is the rest of the ship. McCoy hypothesizes that some form of space madness infected the crew and they killed each other. Chekov, sent to engineering, discovers more bodies, and starts seeing the world through the same Crazy Lens they used to shoot from Mad Spock’s POV in “Is There No Truth In Beauty?” McCoy tries examining one of the corpses and finds his hand goes all the way through it. McCoy calls up and says let’s get the hell out, the ship is dissolving. Scotty says the transporter is on the blink and only 3 people can come back at once. Kirk stays nobly behind. Spock, Bones, McCoy, and Chekov all make it back; but Kirk is in medias beam when the Defiant disappears into some other dimension, presumably taking Kirk with it.  
  
Well, it’s the First Universal Law of Star Trek that Spock only ever gets to command when everything’s going to hell in a handbasket. Problems swarm around poor honey badger like kids around an ice cream truck. To have any chance of recovering Kirk, the Enterprise has to sit tight until the next multidimensional interphase; but there’s a mysterious power drain, and Chekov becomes the first of many to lose his mind, and then out of nowhere this crazy vaguely sphinx-shaped thing appears on screen and starts screeching about the Enterprise has violated Tholian space and they must withdraw immediately or face retribution. Oh, and did I mention that McCoy chugged a whole bottle of asshole pills when he got up that morning? They don’t explicitly mention this, but it must have happened, because it’s the only thing that could possibly explain his behavior toward Spock.  
  
Spock convinces the Tholians to wait for the next 1 hour and 53 minutes until the next interphase; but the Tholians’ arrival into this region of space has disrupted it, and so the Defiant does not appear at the appointed time. The Tholians, who are evidently reknowned for their punctuality, immediately blast the Enterprise. Spock fires back and gets the Tholian ship to back off; but the effort royally fucks up the power on the Enterprise, so they’re unable to maneuver when two smaller Tholian ships show up and start weaving an ‘energy field’ around the Enterprise to trap it.   
  
Assuming that Kirk must now be dead, Spock leads a very brief memorial service for him, and then McCoy hauls him off to Kirk’s quarters to watch the tape Kirk left for them in case of his demise. McCoy pops the tape in. Taped Kirk’s message can be summed up thus: Honey badger, if you’re hearing this, things must be pretty fucked; but I’m sure you can get everyone out of it as long as you combine logic with “intuitive insight” and if you haven’t got the intuitive insight go borrow it from McCoy. Bones, I love your crazy intuitive insight, but Spock’s in charge, so when he gives you an order, you shut the fuck up and carry it out, all right? I love you both, you magnificent bastards, now go kick some Tholian ass!  
  
Well, not exactly; but taped Kirk does succeed in making McCoy realize he’s being an asshole, which finally makes it possible for them to cooperate. Meanwhile Uhura, getting ready for either bedtime or a hot date down in her quarters, looks in the giant mirror (OF COURSE there’s a giant mirror in Uhura’s quarters) and sees the ghostly figure of Kirk, space suit and all, gesturing frantically and silently (I tried to read his lips, but I have no clue what he was saying unless it's 'Help me, Uhura-Wan, you're my only hope') before he flickers out. When she tells McCoy this, of course, he assumes she’s just climbed aboard the space madness train, and takes her down to sickbay and straps her in. Then the ghostly Kirk appears to Scotty in engineering; when he calls the bridge to report this, McCoy notes that once Scotty’s on that train they’re all fucked. He and Spock are getting into it again when all of a sudden Kirk appears on the bridge itself; Spock walks over to touch him but he disappears. Well, all right, now everyone figures that Kirk is still alive but floating in one of the other universes and they can nab him at the next interphase, which will happen about 2 minutes before the Tholians close that web.   
  
But things are looking up! Down in sickbay McCoy has finally created mango juice, excuse me, a space madness antidote. Even screamin’ Chekov is back to normal by the time Kirk floats onto the view screen. An attempt to use full power to grab him somehow manages to throw the Enterprise clear of the web; they reel Kirk in about 30 seconds before his air runs out, and all is well. Back on the bridge and explaining to everyone that he didn’t too much care for being alone in the universe, Kirk asks Spock and McCoy if the last orders tape was any use to them. They claim they never had a chance to play it. Kirk is a little boggled; but on they go, warp factor whatsit. **The End.**  
  
First, a correction: in my last entry I said that Ralph Senensky bailed after wrapping “Is There In Truth No Beauty?” Actually, according to IMDB, he directed about half of “The Tholian Web” but was fired in the middle of it; it was finished by Herb Wallerstein. Does anyone know what the story is there? I bet it’s juicy.    
  
_On edit:[](http://coyotegoth.livejournal.com/profile)[ **coyotegoth**](http://coyotegoth.livejournal.com/) answered this questions in the comments; you can also follow her link to Ralph Senensky's website for the full story._  
  
Like “Is There In Truth No Beauty,” this appears to be an over-the-transom episode. Judy Brown and Chet Roberts were a husband and wife team; it was the first writing credit for both of them. Roberts dropped off the face of the earth, but Brown went on to have quite a successful career in TV. They were obviously watching the show, because “Tholian Web” has strong connections to earlier episodes. Let’s see, we have:  
  
 **Discovery of a Federation ship/colony where all that’s left is dead bodies:** “The Naked Time,” “By Any Other Name,” “And the Children Shall Lead”  
  
 **Spock’s in command and McCoy is an asshole to him:** “Galileo Seven,” “Gamesters of Triskelion”  
  
 **Kirk “dies” and comes back to life:** “Amok Time,” “Return to Tomorrow,” “The Enterprise Incident”  
  
 **Enterprise tangles with another universe:** “The Alternative Factor,” “Mirror, Mirror”  
  
 **Entire crew goes batshit crazy:** “The Naked Time,” “This Side of Paradise,” “And the Children shall Lead,” “Day of the Dove"  
  
 **Mutiny:** Chekov says, when they see the carnage on the Defiant's bridge, "There's never been a mutiny on a starship." Spock agrees. I thought, "That can't be true." IMDB points out that Spock himself planned and carried out a mutiny in "The Menagerie." Spock also mutinies in "This Side of Paradise" (along with McCoy and the rest of the gang) and O'Reilly is the first but not the only one to mutiny in "The Naked Time." Everyone and their dog mutinies in "And the Children Shall Lead." There's probably other examples I'm not remembering. Seemed like in Season One mutiny was just what's for dinner.  
  
But although the Spock/McCoy relationship seems to be trapped in a temporo-spatial anomaly of its own, “The Tholian Web” isn’t a complete retread. As alternate universe stories go, it may not be as much fun as “Mirror, Mirror,” but it knocks seven shades of shite out of “The Alternative Factor.” Though Spock seems to have a pretty good handle on the science of interphasing universes—though the intervals are not regular, he is somehow able to predict them accurately, as long as some Tholian asshole isn’t wreaking havoc with the fabric of space—the other universe manifests the same way ghosts usually do, and this is uncanny enough to be a little bit spooky. (Certainly it’s spookier than anything that happens in “Catspaw.”) The boys are pretty freaked out when they get to the Defiant, perhaps because the production team has done a much better job than usual of using the bodies to tell a story. It’s clear, for instance, that the helmsman died in the act of strangling the captain, and when McCoy’s down in sickbay you can see that some of the corpses were strapped into biobeds—no doubt because they had become dangerously insane—when someone came through and killed them (someone has even gone so far as to put some actual fake blood on one of their heads). The fact that they are for once wearing protective gear—ridiculous as it is—heightens the uncanniness, though sadly Shatner is the only one who consistently remembers to use the push-to-talk feature. (It’s a good thing William Ware Theiss was so talented at putting spacebabes in skimpy outfits, because his spacesuit portfolio would NEVER have gotten him this job. Who the fuck uses mesh for their space helmets? Isn’t the whole point that the helmet keeps air IN?) Of course this is dictated by the plot—if Kirk wasn’t wearing a space suit, he’d have exploded instantaneously once he got marooned—but still, once you get past the lameness of the square strainers it’s a good effect.   
  
The Tholian web thing is a neat idea, though one can’t imagine that this tactic comes in too handy in most battle situations. For an opponent who could, you know, move, it would be completely ineffective. However, it’s an interesting variation on the ol’ phasers-and-deflectors routine, and suggests perhaps that the Tholians have some Vulcanesque scruples about actually destroying a ship that’s totally disabled. It’s a very simple special effect, but it’s effectively deployed; every time you see the screen, that web is closer to done, and it’s a subtler way of ratcheting up the tension than, say, having Sulu tell you how much time you have left every two minutes. It would be nice if there were a clear explanation of how they manage to get _out_ of this diabolical thing; but hey. It’s Season 3. Anything that’s not a big ball of suck is a treat. And how can you pass up an alien race whose badassery is founded on their fearsome “punctuality”?   
  
This episode also gives Uhura something important to do, which is nice. It’s hard to repress a groan when that vanity and its mirror swing into view; but at least this time what she sees in it isn’t her withered and ugly old-woman face. Although it’s infuriating to watch McCoy patronize her when she reports Kirk’s apparition, at least the episode proves him wrong. You’d think McCoy might have figured out that Uhura’s symptoms were atypical—she even says, casting a wary eye on the screaming lunatic in the corner, “Will I become like Chekov?”, subtext no doubt being "Please kill me before it gets to that point"—but perhaps he attributed the lack of homicidal mutinous rage to her being a woman. As irritating as it is to see that they only believe in the apparition after the men start reporting it, one can’t quite blame McCoy for thinking Uhura is going mad; when he first encounters her, she’s running down the corridor in a flowing caftan screaming, “Mr. Spock! Mr. Spock!” and she’s all agitated and breathy and obsessed and literally faints in his arms. This episode suggests that her feelings toward Kirk are more positive than they have hitherto appeared to be; she’s clearly happy to see him in the mirror, and after McCoy tells her that what she saw was real and Kirk is still alive somewhere, she brushes away a tear of joy. Not 100% credible to me based on how much of a jerk he often is to her; but at least it’s good setup for “Plato’s Stepchildren.”    
  
There are some nice little touches; the first time Spock hears someone page him as “Captain,” it takes a minute to realize it means him, and I particularly like the scene in which McCoy introduces the antidote. It’s a flask on a tray with little glasses and McCoy serves it up like a cocktail—which it sort of is. As he explains to Scotty, it’s based on a nerve gas the Klingons invented; turns out when you dilute it with alcohol, instead of killing you, it merely “deadens certain nerve inputs to the brain.” Scotty points out that “any good bottle of scotch’ll do that.” When McCoy extols the antidote’s painkilling virtues, Scotty asks if it would be good with a little scotch. McCoy’s not sure. Scotty grabs the flask and exits, promising, “I’ll let you know.”  
  
OK, so, more yuks about Scotty’s drinking; but then there’s the little moment when McCoy and Spock knock it back together. In one of the few bright moments in “The Conscience of the King,” way back in Season One, McCoy asks Spock to join him in “a drop of the dew” and seems genuinely disappointed to learn that Vulcans can’t drink and that he will therefore never have a chance to go get drunk and bond with Spock in a bar, something you figure he must have done a lot when he was building up his friendship with Kirk. But lo and behold, having worked through their differences, here they are finally having a drink together. Both seem to be aware of the ironies, but both are also relieved to be solemnizing their rapprochement in what, for McCoy at least, is a meaningful way.  
  
Before that moment, however, the burning question on every faithful viewer’s mind must be: what the FUCK is up McCoy’s ass today? OK, losing Jim is stressful, and McCoy at one point suggests that maybe he’s got a touch of the ol’ space madness; but nothing really explains his completely assholic behavior to Spock. It’s worse even than in “Immunity Syndrome.” He accuses Spock of deliberately angling to get “Jim’s Command,” of being indifferent to the search for an antidote because “Vulcans are probably immune,” of not having the ship’s best interests at heart, of being a worse captain than Jim, and anything else that occurs to him. The fact that Spock doesn’t just let out a primal scream and tear all of McCoy’s limbs off is a real testament to his special fucking badass Vulcan mental discipline. The closest he gets is when McCoy is spinning out one of his theories about how Spock is going to play this into getting promoted to captain of the Enterprise, and Spock says, “Doctor, I AM captain of the Enterprise.” You tell him, honey badger!   
  
It’s worse somehow because McCoy’s critique of Spock’s actions is totally incoherent and self-contradictory. No matter what decision Spock makes it’s proof of his callous self-interest. As always, Nimoy makes you feel the hurt even while refusing to dignify McCoy’s viciousness with a response. You really feel for poor honey badger; Spock tries to talk McCoy out of attending the memorial service, no doubt not wanting to have to do something he feels painfully unfit for under his baleful glare. But McCoy won’t go back to sickbay; so Spock has to get through it as best he can. Realizing that he can’t stand up there and talk about either his emotions or theirs, Spock asks them to ‘evaluate the loss in your own thoughts;’ there’s a moment of silence and then Scotty dismisses everyone.   
  
What seems to get to McCoy about the last orders tape is Kirk telling McCoy that Spock is capable of both human insight and “human error.” If one can find any rationale for the unbelievable load of shit that McCoy dishes out to Spock, it perhaps would be that until Kirk says this, it hasn’t occurred to McCoy that Spock might actually be fallible, and that perhaps they are in this crappy situation not because Spock is hatching some coldly logical plan for world domination, but because Spock is half-human and sometimes his emotions might lead him to make mistakes. As often happens, McCoy feels much better once he’s convinced that Spock does actually have feelings. “It still hurts, doesn’t it?” he says, after apologizing. Nimoy’s delivery of Spock’s response—“What would you have me say, doctor?”—is a great less-is-more moment. It says “I’m so tired of your bullshit,” “My grief is so frighteningly vast that if I articulated it it would destroy your soul,” and “I wish I could communicate with you but I can’t,” all at the same time.   
  
You know one thing I’ve always loved about honey badger? The way he handles it when humans apologize to him. He doesn’t get mad; he’s never outright rude; but he consistently refuses to help the apologizer feel better. There’s none of this “oh, that’s OK, don’t worry about it, no harm done” bullshit. He just lets the apologizer sit there in his remorse. It’s one of the most badass Vulcan things about him. In this episode, after McCoy has his one final outburst on the bridge and then apologizes once again, Spock finally does try to smooth it over—but he can only do it by quoting Kirk: “I imagine he would have said…’Forget it, Bones.’” Yeah, he would have…but Captain Spock doesn’t do that shit.  
  
All this anxiety about Spock being a captain is especially interesting when you remember that Vulcan/human friction is a coded exploration of American racial politics. Captain HFV insinuates in “The Enterprise Incident” that First Officer is the Federation’s glass ceiling for the racial Other; and the fact that he’s at least temporarily broken it seems to bring all of McCoy’s racist bullshit to the surface. Burns and Richards don’t write in the kind of overtly racist cracks McCoy makes in some other episodes, but they don’t have to; the fact that McCoy’s rantings don’t actually make sense is proof enough that they’re bigotry-driven. Kind of like how when we finally elected someone President who wasn’t a white guy, every last racist in the country crawled out of the woodwork to vomit his hysterical bullshit all over whatever he could reach. But I digress.  
  
I’ve never quite known what to make of the fact that McCoy and Spock have decided to lie to Kirk about viewing the last orders tape. Kirk clearly knows that something is up; after all, McCoy has hinted that they did encounter some difficulties working together. It’s easy enough to see why McCoy would want to adopt a “let us never speak of this again” attitude toward Spock’s captaincy, but why Spock colludes in this is a more complicated question. Perhaps it’s just one more triangulation moment, in which Kirk for once gets to be the one ejected from the dyad. Or maybe they both just decided it’d be way too awkward to deal with Kirk knowing that they know what his last orders were. Either way, they seem to have patched things up. But this is where you really feel the lack of a story arc. How many goddamn times do you have to see the same characters learn the same lessons?   
  
Then again, maybe I’m taking the final banter more seriously than the team did. Shatner delivers Kirk’s dialogue about his recent experiences without showing any trace of trauma, or even significant emotion; if the idea was that he’s joking to cover up his pain, well, it’s too well covered up. In _Moby Dick_ , a boy named Pip jumps out of a whaleboat during a chase and is left behind while everyone else attends to the whale. Melville says that staying afloat in the open ocean on a calm day is not hard, but being that alone with the immensity of the ocean is; and by the time Pip is picked up on the way back to the ship he’s Gone Mad just from the vastness. You would expect that being literally alone in the universe for three hours would scar a guy; but it doesn’t seem to have made an impression on him at all.  
  
All in all, “The Tholian Web” ranks as one of the brighter spots in Season 3. But it never generated the buzz of what’s coming up next: “Plato’s Stepchildren!”


	64. PLATO'S STEPCHILDREN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This episode is notorious as the one in which Kirk and Uhura made television history by kissing on camera. On rewatch I was more struck by how disturbing and sadistic everything is in this episode, and how hideously nonconsensual that kiss is. But all this is discussed below.

**August 7, 2012**

**PLATO’S STEPCHILDREN**  
 **Written by Meyer Dolinsky**  
  
“Spock.”  
“Yes, Captain.”  
“Do you remember how, after we took down that Apollo guy with the green giant hand, I was thinking maybe we could have avoided destroying the last of the ancient Greek gods, and whether it would have hurt us, I wonder, to have gathered a few laurel leaves?”  
“The question is recorded in your log for stardate—“  
“Yes, Mr. Spock. You will be relieved to know that after our encounter with the Platonians, I know the answer to that question. Would you like to hear it?”  
“Ceratinly, Captain.”  
“YES IT WOULD! IT FUCKING HURTS! HOLY FUCK! GET THOSE FUCKING PSYCHOPATHS THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME! WHAT THE FUCK IS THE MATTER WITH THOSE PEOPLE?”  
“Trenchant analysis, Captain. I am forced to concur.”  
“Hold me, Spock!”  
“I held you last time, Jim. It is you who must hold me.”  
“Fair enough.”  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise is responding to a distress call from an apparently uninhabited planet. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down into a neoclassical courtyard, where they encounter a gigantic shadow which asks with stentorian voice if they’re the guys from the Enterprise. Informed that they are, the owner of the voice emerges and surprise! It’s Balok with a bowl of trania!  
  
No. No, tragically, it’s not. This time the punchline of the Big Scary Alien joke is a dwarf named Alexander. In what must be the fastest-delivered exposition in the history of the show, Alexander informs them that they are among the Platonians, a group of aliens that left their home planet just before their sun went nova (hey, just like the Febrini) and hung out on Earth during the time of the ancient Greeks, coming to admire the ideas of Plato above all else. They fetched up here on this planet and built their new society according to the blueprint of Plato’s _Republic_. Sadly, Parmen, the philosopher-king, has contracted an infection, and since this republic apparently doesn’t have any doctors, they had to convince McCoy to come down and work his magic.   
  
Well, it soon becomes clear that McCoy should never have agreed to take patients outside his HMO. Parmen and his wife Philana (played by Barbara Babcock, who must have gotten a PhD in icy patrician hauteur) are the leaders of a society of 38 eugenics-refined specimens who have developed incredible psychic powers which allow them to manipulate material objects with their minds. Alexander doesn’t have these powers, which is why the whole colony uses him as their buffoon, whipping boy, and general dogsbody. How powerful are the Platonians’ minds? Well, when Parmen gets delirious, not only does all the furniture go flying, but the Enterprise reports turbulence. Luckily for everyone McCoy’s All-Purpose Intergalactic Antibiotic works. Parmen’s cured; but Kirk finds they can’t beam up; the transporter’s out, the Enterprise can’t get out of orbit, and subspace communication with Starfleet is impossible. Kirk confronts Parmen about this, who uses his psychic power to force Kirk to beat himself up.  
  
After that incident, Kirk, Spock and McCoy are summoned—on Platonius, being “summoned” means being dragged telekinetically through the corridors while flailing like a demented marionette—to Parmen and Philana’s room, where they are thanked, apologized to, and presented with gifts. They’re now free to go—except McCoy has to stay and be their physician on call for, like, ever. McCoy refuses. Parmen decides to persuade McCoy by torturing Spock and Kirk. The method chosen is to make them humiliate themselves and each other. It takes an excruciatingly long time to get there; but eventually Kirk’s pawing the air like a rearing stallion while Alexander rides him bareback and Spock is collapsed in a weeping puddle while McCoy looks on with horror. And finally, mercifully, we cut to commercial.  
  
As McCoy has informed us for the first time ever, forcing Vulcans to experience emotion “destroys” them. (Look who now knows so much about Vulcan physiology. Maybe he can explain how, in that case, Spock survived the crazy plague in “Naked Time.”) So back in their quarters, Spock stares into space trying to repair his ravaged soul through special badass Vulcan discipline while Kirk nurses his sore muscles. Alexander comes in proclaiming that he has rediscovered his self-respect and wants to kill Parmen and the others. While searching for less bloodthirsty alternatives, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy deduce with Alexander’s help that the psychic powers derive from the native flora and that the active ingredient is “curanide.” McCoy, who has evidently brought a huge supply of curanide with him in his medkit, injects Kirk and Spock (though curiously not himself) with it; Alexander declines, as he’s seen enough to know psy power makes people assholes. All Alexander wants is for them to take him out of this hellhole when they go.   
  
They figure the curanide will take some time to kick in but they don’t know how long. Uhura and Chapel materialize. They don’t respond to any of Kirk’s salutations, and are ‘summoned’ on out the door. Kirk rounds off a series of dismayed closeups by saying what everyone’s thinking: “I guess we weren’t sufficiently…entertaining.”  
  
Uhura and Chapel wander into a darkened room all dolled up in neo-Grecian fashion. (Uhura looks pretty good in her outfit. Nurse Chapel looks like hell on a stick. Not only has she been given the worst wig in an epic history of horrible wigs, but her eye makeup makes her look like the Bride of Frankenstein.) Kirk and Spock soon appear, decked out equally ridiculously. (Kirk’s ensemble looks a lot like Apollo’s from “Adonais” and exposes just as much of an equally hairless pink chest, pushing up the Kirk’s Denuded Torsometer.) Lights go on, curtain goes up, and it’s torture time. Only this time they’re calling it “theater,” and Parmen’s invited the whole colony to watch.  
  
After forcing Spock to serenade the ladies with a lute, Parmen forces Spock into a clinch with Chapel and Kirk into a clinch with Uhura. After both couples are forced to kiss, Philana gets bored and tries to hurry Parmen up. Parmen leaps ahead to the “piece de resistance,” which is—I am not kidding—forcing Kirk to grab a bullwhip and Spock to pick up a red-hot poker and lumber back toward their respective clinchmates. The bullwhip is snapping inches from Uhura’s nose when McCoy finally tells Parmen he’ll do anything he wants if he’ll only stop it. Alexander grabs a knife off the torture table and goes for Parmen. Parmen turns the knife back on Alexander. The knife goes sideways instead. Parmen yells, “Who did that?” Kirk says, “I did.”  
  
Yep, the curanide has finally kicked in. Kirk and Parmen have a brief psi-off using Alexander and his knife as their proxy before Parmen, with the blade at his throat, admits defeat and starts groveling. Parmen promises to treat future Federation envoys nicely. Kirk reminds them that they can produce psi power on command. Then he calls Scotty and says to beam them up…and they have a visitor with them! Alexander smiles. **The End.**  
  
Sweet fancy Moses.  
  
Go get yourself a sandwich and a bag of chips, this one's gonna take a while. On second thought, maybe you better bring along a bottle of scotch.  
  
It says something about the state of racial politics in America in 1968 that what the network executives chose to freak out about in this episode was a white man kissing a Black woman. Christ almighty, people. What about a white man threatening a Black woman with a fucking BULLWHIP?  
  
I’m sorry. I’ll start again.  
  
I don’t suppose this episode ever won an Emmy; but it certainly wins the gold medal for Most Perverse Use of a Classical Education. I don’t know what Plato ever did to Dolinsky, but these “Platonians” are without a doubt the most sadistic bunch of aliens we have yet encountered. Yes, that includes the Gamesters of Triskelion. After all, all _they_ ask of their thralls is to kill each other in a fair fight. You give me a choice between being shocked by a pain collar and being manipulated by Parmen for the entertainment of Philana and their buddies, and I will take the pain collar. In fact, if you are ever given a choice between being tortured by the Platonians and the Klingons, I recommend you go with the Klingons. Even the Cardassians are refreshingly straightforward in comparison. I’ve given the matter some thought, and I think it is actually easier to watch Picard being zapped with the Cardassian pain device in “Chain of Command” than it is to watch what happens to Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Chapel, and Alexander in this episode. The BBC evidently felt the same way, because they wouldn’t air this episode (or, if memory serves, “The Empath”) for a long time because of the, how shall I put it, sadism. For the Platonians, torture is about 5% business and 95% pleasure. Very bad breakdown.  
  
It would be OK if it were so ridiculous that you could just laugh at it. Indeed, it very nearly is. If you were new to the show, the insane WTFery would probably overwhelm any other response. Even among veteran fans I would say ROTFLMAO is probably among the top ten reactions to this episode. Unfortunately for me, the fact that the actors—-Shatner first and foremost-—totally commit to this lunacy means that the torture scenes hover right on the boundary between awful as in crap and awful as in disturbing, locating this episode in what we might call the Grotesque Zone. Some of the things they’re made to do are pretty stupid-—a dippy little dance while reciting a rhyme based on “Jabberwocky,” for instance-—but the fact that they are shown resisting it all the way and yet still doing it makes it hideous. The worst moment of the first torture scene, for me, is when Kirk crawls on his belly toward Philana while reciting Shakespeare’s sonnet #57 (which begins, “Why should I, being your slave…”) as if the words are being dragged out of his throat along with his bowels. Poor Spock is forced into a kind of quasi-flamenco performance around Kirk’s prostrate form which ends with him nearly stepping on Kirk’s face. It’s the moment when Spock’s go-go boot is hovering a millimeter above Kirk’s upstaring eyes that you realize how unavoidably sexual dominance games are; and you don’t have to buy into the Slash Hypothesis to see this as a preview of what Parmen will spring on them in the second torture scene. (I think Philana buys into the Slash Hypothesis, based on her distribution of the presents. Kirk gets “the shield carried by Pericles” in honor of his “gallant leadership;” what the “cerebral and silent Mr. Spock” gets is one of those crazy lutes so he can “soothe his [and she’s gotta mean Kirk’s] ever-active brow." Would make sense. The one thing we know for sure about Philana is that she likes to watch.)  
  
In fact, during their recuperation, Spock-—who is as depressed as a Vulcan’s ever been-—indicates being forced to almost hurt Kirk has evoked feelings of rage and hatred in him that he never knew his Vulcan soul could contain. This leads into a discussion of catharsis which is one of many little moments in which Dolinsky shows that he knows a little more about the tradition he’s fucking with than, say, the author of “Who Mourns for Adonais?” did. (When Kirk comes in to confront Parmen, Alexander interrupts the song he’s singing to deliver the croaking chorus from Aristophanes’ _Frogs_ , prefiguring the way Parmen is about to turn Kirk into his own private Greek comedy.) McCoy takes the Aristotelian view of emotion, arguing that it’s “healthy” to express it and thereby purge yourself of it. Spock’s response is quite revealing: “That may be, Doctor. However, I have noted that the healthy release of emotion is frequently very unhealthy for those closest to you.” Who knows what childhood crises and traumas lie behind that statement; or perhaps he’s thinking back to Ponn Farr. Either way, he declares his intention of “mastering” his anger instead of expressing it, though the fact that he crushes a winecup with one hand while making this declaration doesn’t cheer anyone up.  
  
But of course the big story on this episode comes out of the second torture sequence, in which we get The First Interracial Kiss on Television.  
  
It’s probably not an accident that the first interracial kiss on television is one in which neither party has to acknowledge desire for the other—and one which most viewers would never acknowledge being turned on by. And which is presented as perverse, and which represents interracial sexuality as something horrible that neither party would submit to voluntarily. I mean imagine the things that got said when Roddenberry was trying to talk the suits around to letting them air it. “It’s OK-—it’s not like he actually _wants_ to kiss her.” Or, “It’s OK—-it’s SUPPOSED to be horrifying!” Or, “It’s OK—-it’s not like Uhura really has any power over him.” Or, “Trust me, it’s not going to inspire people to run out and do likewise.” Or maybe he went with, “Look, according to you guys nobody’s watching the show anyway, so what’s your problem?”   
  
The story I’ve always heard about this is that nobody in the cast or crew thought anything of the Kirk/Uhura liplock until the networks got wind of it and freaked the fuck out. (It is also part of the lore that at the suits’ behest they filmed two versions of the kiss—-one where their lips actually touched, and one where they didn’t. Sort of reminds me of how the Matt the gay guy’s first kiss on _Melrose Place_ was actually done in blurred slow-motion. In the version included in the remastered DVD, Kirk and Uhura turn their heads at the last minute so that when they would presumably be connecting, their mouths are not visible, and the viewer’s attention is fixed on Kirk’s stare of rage and hatred, which is directed away from Uhura and out toward the camera.) In the context of the episode, the fact that Kirk is white and Uhura is Black is totally not the point. The point is that both the Kirk/Uhura kiss and the Spock/Chapel kiss are grotesquely nonconsensual; and to those of us whose understanding of race is not stuck in the 1860s, _that’s_ what makes this scene so awful.   
  
Parmen’s manipulation engineers a scenario in which _all_ of the participants are being coerced. Dolinsky also seems to have grasped a principle which would later be exploited by fanfic writers everywhere: while being forced into a sexual situation with someone you hate is awful, being forced into a sexual situation with someone you actually like and trust is much, much worse. (Anyone out there remember Janis Cortese’s “The Borrower?” I do. HOLY FUCK!) If Dolinsky wanted to bring down two women who had histories with the lead characters, Uhura was going to have to be one of ‘em. So basically, once Dolinsky conceived this scenario, an interracial kiss became inevitable.  
  
On Spock and Chapel’s side of this tableau, it’s pretty much all bad. Chapel’s been carrying a torch for Spock pretty obviously and pathetically through two and a half seasons. In addition to the callously cruel Platonian audience she’s got the whole Star Trek viewing audience watching this knowing that her long-cherished fantasy has been turned into a nightmare. What could be worse than getting what you always wanted in a way that makes you so sick to your stomach that you will never thereafter be able to want it again? Don’t answer that question, I don’t want to know. Even worse, Spock has been on the receiving end of her awkward and unwanted attentions several times already, and Chapel knows how much he doesn’t want any of this. Their dialogue emphasizes the fact that, as often happens with women who are the victims of sexual assault, Chapel has internalized the shame that by rights ought to belong to Parmen and the spectators:  
  
 **CHAPEL: I’m so ashamed. Please make them stop.  
SPOCK: We have tried.  
CHAPEL: Please, please make them stop. [SPOCK tries]  
SPOCK: I haven’t the power. I’m deeply sorry. I’ve failed you.  
CHAPEL: For so long I wanted to be close to you. Now all I want to do is crawl away and die.**  
  
Spock’s apology for having “failed” her brings him closer to acknowledging feelings for her than he’s been since “Amok Time;” but of course that, like their physical proximity, can only be painful for her now. He’s deeply distressed at being made the instrument of her torment, and he also has to get race-baited the Platonian peanut gallery: “Remember, Cupid’s arrow kills Vulcans!” For anyone who cares about either character, it’s heartbreaking to watch (unless you fall into the segment of the population that is ROTFLing over things like the fact that Kirk's and Spock's tunics barely cover their butts). So basically, this scene continues the proud Star Trek tradition of using Spock and Chapel to humiliate each other—-only this time, it’s _supposed_ to hurt.  
  
On the other couch, however, we have what I would argue is Uhura’s best scene since “Mirror, Mirror.” Compare their dialogue with Spock's and Chapel's:  
  
 **UHURA: I’m so frightened, Captain. I’m so very frightened.  
KIRK: That’s the way they want you to feel. It makes them think that they’re alive.  
UHURA: I know it. But I wish I could stop trembling.  
KIRK: Try not to think of them. Try.  
UHURA: I’m thinking…I’m thinking of all the times on the Enterprise when I was scared to death and I would see you so busy at your command, and I would hear your voice from all parts of the ship, and my fears would fade. And now they’re making me tremble, but I’m not afraid. I am not afraid.**  
  
True, she opens with a double “I’m frightened.” True, she talks about how his manly sway and protective voice used to make her fears vanish. The paternalism of all that critiques itself. But she’s calling up these memories in a deliberate attempt to join Kirk’s resistance-—an effort that requires a considerable amount of courage on her part, since it’s now clear that absolutely anything can be done to them. Refusing to be terrified may not seem like much, but since she is physically incapable of action, controlling her emotional response to what they force on her is the only form of agency she can have. By the time she gets forced into the kiss, she has basically willed herself not to give a shit: “They’re making me tremble,” she says, looking out at the Platonian audience, “but I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid.” Depriving the spectators of the pleasure of watching her terror is just about the most badass thing Uhura could be doing at this moment. It’s the emotional equivalent of Spock walking around full of torture tentacles from the flying brain cells but not going mad because “pain is a thing of the mind.” And, I would point out, this extremely limited act of resistance actually succeeds. Philana, who’s been watching quite attentively so far, reacts to the Kirk/Uhura kiss by telling Parmen to move it along because she’s bored. Clearly she doesn't get what she wants out of this performance.  
  
If you don’t believe there’s any badassery going on here, try this experiment: Imagine this scene with Janice Rand in it. Because you know that if Rand had survived as a character and been developed along the lines they originally imagined for her, it would have been her in that clinch instead of Uhura. Are you seeing it? OK. Now watch how Uhura does it. Are you feeling the badassery now?   
  
Great. Let us stop for a moment and celebrate Nichelle Nichols for finding ways to make Uhura badass, not only in this scene but in all the tiny bits and pieces she’s been allowed to do on the show up to this point. It’s like Nichols stayed up every night looking over every script she was in trying to figure out ways to make Uhura stronger. And that’s what she does here. Yeah, you could ruin it and say that this is just Dolinsky using Uhura’s presumed attraction to Kirk to make her will her own violation. That's legitimate. I  need some upside in my life, so I choose to focus on the fact that by saying that “they’re making me tremble” while looking at the 'audience,' Nichols indicates not only that Uhura’s not trembling with fear, but that she’s not trembling with desire either. Nichols never lets Uhura look as if this is easy or pleasant for her; on her way into the clinch you can see her struggling to get over her fear and finally doing it. So Uhura has departed from the script by not only by refusing to be terrified of sexual violence but by refusing to be ashamed of being assaulted.   
  
I woudl like to make it clear that I'm not dissing Chapel for not being able to do this. First of all, unlike Uhura she is getting no help from her co-victim, who feels just as vulnerable and powerless as she does. Second...well, the fact that this is a situation from which it is very hard to extract any kidn of agency is exactly what makes Uhura's limited success remarkable.  
  
For Uhura as a human being in her own world this is a horrible moment. But Uhura as a character actually emerges from this scene stronger than she went into it.   
  
That is, until Kirk picks up the fucking BULLWHIP.  
  
It’s flabbergasting to me that the kiss was a bigger problem for the suits than the bullwhip was. (McCoy’s got his priorities straight: he can just about stand to watch the kiss, but the bullwhip and the poker get him to surrender.) But it’s really not flabbergasting at all, is it. American culture is still far more comfortable with violence than it is with sexuality. Men hurting women-—white men hurting Black women-—that’s all fine and dandy if you love the status quo. Smooching, oh my God, lock up the belles and hide the china.  
  
So, this is an example of Star Trek at its simultaneous best and worst. Nichols gets to show what she can do, and Uhura gets to do something difficult, complicated, and-—if you read it the way I’m reading it, I understand not everyone will-—brave. But at what fucking price, man!   
  
And this brings me to a question I find myself asking more and more often these days: what is all this torment in aid of? Why make these characters do this, and why make us watch it?  
  
It’s not to make a point, as far as I can tell. Sure, there’s the subplot about Kirk inspiring Alexander to liberate himself from the Platonians, and the requisite conversations about how much better life is in the Federation utopia—-where, Kirk assures Alexander, “size, shape or color makes no difference”-—than it is in this autocratic/aristocratic/academic joint. But there’s no ‘message’ in this episode that hasn’t already been delivered more effectively without this much inflicted pain. Power corrupts, huh? Geez, that was totally not brought home at all in “Patterns of Force.” Psychic power even scarier? Glad you mentioned it, cause “Charlie X” left me with some doubts on that subject which were not allayed by “And the Children Shall Lead.” It's disgusting how the rich and powerful like to torment lesser beings for fun? I kind of thought that was where “Gamesters of Triskelion” was going but maybe I was wrong. The Greeks were totally fucked up? You mean like more fucked up than Apollo?   
  
I also have to wonder why it is that when these guys meet a race of aliens whose mental capacities are superior to their own, these aliens often turn out to have built their society around tormenting the more robustly embodied. There’s the melon-headed Talosians in “The Cave”/”The Menagerie,” the squeezable brains in “Gamesters of Triskelion,” and now these bastards. We do have exceptions in the Organians, the Medusans, and Sargon and Thalassa from “Return to Tomorrow.” But usually, the argument runs thus: develop the brain too much and the body atrophies. Since we can’t do without the body, this means exploitation at best, and more likely abduction, slavery, torture, and death for the ordinarily brained. Oh, hey, maybe there is a startling new message here after all: Intellectuals are evil! Don't EVER let those elitist bastards get their hands on the reins of power!  
  
After all, Parmen and Philana are the biggest snobs in the galaxy (especially Philana; she does that “you are a squashed bug but your torment kind of turns me on” look so well). They make Alexander do all the shitwork so they can be free to contemplate; but they don’t seem to _do_ anything with their awesome brainpower except torment people. Parmen tries to sell Kirk on the idea that their society is pure democracy because power is apportioned based on strength of mind and not strength of body; but we’re clearly not meant to buy this, and in fact it turns out that this supposedly intellectual power is glandular. “Curanide” is broken down by the pituitary hormone, which is why Alexander (who, remember, is a dwarf) never got the power. So these Platonians are as body-bound as the rest of us, and they are eventually punished for trying to pretend they’re not. The fact that this happens in the context of an episode devoted to trashing Greek culture makes the anti-intellectual reading more persuasive. So does Alexander’s final outburst toward Parmen: “I could have had your power, but I didn’t want it. I could have had your place right now, but the sight of you and your academicians sickens me. Despite your brains, you’re the most contemptible things that ever lived in this universe.”  
  
Or perhaps it’s just another expression of the American inferiority complex relative to a much older European culture. Much play is made of the fact that the “Platonians” are all around 2500 years old (their eugenics program must have really been something), and Kirk’s outburst from the floor—-right before he has to turn around and put the whip into play—-accuses them of having died “centuries ago” and being reduced to preying vampirically on the vitality of the young. Spock later observes that Parmen’s 2500 years have made him “arrogant.” This is also the second time on this series that canonical British poetry has been used as a torture device. Charlie X might have thought he was badass for making Spock recite Blake; but that’s nothing. Watch Kirk doing Shakespeare On The Floor, Charlie, and bow to the master.  
  
You could say that one thing this episode has going for it is that it shows evidence of thinking about the conditions and consequences of torture. Reconnoitering in their quarters after Kirk’s self-inflicted beating, Kirk and Spock have this very interesting exchange about how the Platonians’ penchant for abusing their ‘guests’ fits into their overall policies. McCoy asks why they’ve cut off communication with the Enterprise; after all, Parmen might still need their medical labs. Spock says it’s probably to prevent people from finding out about their “brutal treatment of a starship captain.” Kirk initially disagrees:  
  
 **KIRK: No, Mr. Spock, one thing’s for certain: Parmen is not concerned with my dignity or safety.**  
SPOCK: Agreed, Captain. And Parmen would not have treated you so brutally if he had any intention of releasing you or the Enterprise.  
  
And this, my friends, is why Guantanamo has not been closed. Because once you torture people, you can’t release them. Not if you don’t want everyone else to know that your supposedly democratic “republic” is bullshit. In another depressing reminder of how times have changed, Kirk responds to Parmen’s expressed amazement at the fact that he hasn’t had his throat cut with, “To us, killing is murder, even for revenge.” Ah, the good old days, when even though that wasn’t true, at least Americans _wanted_ to believe it was.  
  
At first glance, it looks as if this episode actually takes trauma seriously. It takes Kirk, and especially Spock, an unusually long time to pull themselves together after that first session; one could argue that Spock never really does, given that in his scene with Chapel he seems to share her shame and despair. The effects of a lifetime of being dominated are visible in Alexander. This is only true as far as the men go, however. We don’t know how long it took Uhura or Chapel to get over _their_ trauma--because as soon as Kirk and Spock break Parmen’s hold, both the women disappear. From that moment to the final closeup there is not a single shot that includes either Uhura or Chapel. Their trauma, in other words, is important to Dolinsky and the director (David Alexander, a newbie to the show) only instrumentally; what matters to them is not so much that the women are being tormented as that the men are being tormented by being forced to torment them.  
  
So all in all, I have to come back to my gut feeling, which is that the raison d’etre of this episode, as far as its creators are concerned, is simply to engineer the torment. The torture scenes are dragged out as long as they can be and milked for every drop available; the second one is even padded out with Spock's first musical number, during which Nimoy establishes that he can carry a tune but that he shouldn't necessarily try. Certainly Dolinsky doesn’t waste an ounce more effort on the rest of the plot than he has to. (A society that achieved space travel and practical immortality hasn’t invented Bacitracin? McCoy just wanders around with a huge bucket of the “rare” mineral curanide in his kit? McCoy discovers the secret of creating telekinetic ability through a simple vitamin shot, and yet nobody ever speaks of this again?) The 'plot' appears, in other words, to be an excuse for the two set pieces, which provide most of the episode's interest. (There's so little going on on the Enterprise itself in this episode that Takei and Koenig didn't even bother showing up for work.) Which kind of makes us the Platonians in this scenario, though the director protects us from this by encouraging us to identify with McCoy and Alexander’s horrified reactions rather than the interested/aroused/amused reactions of the Platonians.   
  
So though this episode may, in various ways, be bad, it is not with the simple badness of “And the Children Shall Lead,” or even the more pukeworthy badness of “The Omega Glory.” There’s some kind of story being told here about spectatorship itself, about our ambivalence about the suffering of our favorite characters. We need them to suffer precisely because we love the emotional intensities and intimacies that their suffering creates. And I could go on trying to work this out, but this is one long-ass review even by my standards…and we’ve got “The Empath” coming up, so there’ll be plenty of time.  
  
Up next: “Lee Cronin” is back with “Wink of an Eye.”


	65. WINK OF AN EYE

**STARDATE: August 8, 2012**

**WINK OF AN EYE**  
 **Written by Arthur Heinemann from a story by “Lee Cronin” (Gene L. Coon)**  
  
With “Plato’s Stepchildren” behind me and “The Empath” before me, it’s just nice to have a normal episode to review this time. No bullwhips, no hot pokers, just Kirk being a stud.  
  
Literally.  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise responds to a distress call from an apparently uninhabited planet called Scalos. (For the second week in a row. Do these people learn NOTHING?) Kirk, McCoy, Spock, and a redshirt named Compton beam down to the coordinates from which the distress call is coming, but they don’t see any of the Scalosians that Scotty and the bridge crew are looking right at on the viewscreen. Apart from an insectlike high-pitched whine, there’s no sign of life at all. They’re about to give it up for lost and beam back up when Compton, who evidently never took Basic Landing Party Safety Training, takes a swig from a nearby fountain and disappears before McCoy’s very eyes.   
  
Well, the rest of them hightail it back to the Enterprise; but something funky is clearly going on. Weird fluctuations and malfunctions are appearing and disappearing. Kirk keeps hearing that whine and he feels like he’s being touched by something invisible. A funky-looking vacuum cleaner has mysteriously appeared in life support, which is now protected by a forcefield which for some reason only Kirk and Spock can penetrate. The computer helpfully confirms their suspicion that the ship has been invaded; its recommendation is to negotiate for terms. Kirk doesn’t like that recommendation. A yeoman walks by with a tray of coffee (in the future, they will still be serving coffee in disposable plastic cups). Kirk puts his down for a minute; by the time he picks it up again, something’s been added to it. Everything slows down. The bridge crew seems to be frozen. And all of a sudden, a blonde bombshell draped in pastel polyester wearing a silver collar with a floral brooch appears and explains that her name is Deela and she’s the queen of the Scalosians.   
  
Many years ago, a cataclysmic series of volcanic eruptions decimated the Scalosian population. Those who survived were somehow ‘accelerated.’ They now live and move so fast that they cannot be seen by the human eye. Kirk, having been dosed with the Scalosian water, is now ‘accelerated.’ Kirk can no longer interact with the crew; he’s moving so fast relative to them that to him, they appear frozen, and to them, he is invisible. However, he can perceive and interact with Deela and the Scalosians. On the one hand, he can start figuring out how and why the Scalosians are taking over his ship. On the other hand, Deela’s chosen him as her breeding partner, consort, rent boy, sex slave, stud bull…call it what you will. You see, all the Scalosian men have been rendered sterile by the same radiation poisoning that ‘accelerated’ them. So the way Deela and the other Scalosian women keep the species alive is by abducting and accelerating humanoid males from passing spaceships and breeding with them. Once  a man is ‘accelerated’ he eventually becomes ‘docile’ enough to cooperate. Sadly, they don’t last very long; the accelerated metabolism means that any ‘cell damage’ they sustain leads to rapid aging and death. Deela’s not entirely happy with this solution but she’s quite pleased with Kirk. This of course stokes the fires of jealous in the leader of this expedition, Rael, who’s in love with Deela.   
  
Kirk’s first efforts at resistance are futile—while trying to disconnect the machine in life support, he gets Comtpon killed (Compton has, of course, also been ‘accelerated’ and become ‘docile’; he’s been helping the invaders, but when Rael goes for Kirk Compton defends him and gets zapped for it) and nearly freezes his own hands off. His next idea is to communicate with Spock by taping a message and leaving it for him. Deela is amused by this, and lets him do it; she thinks that by the time Spock gets it it’ll be too late for him to do anything. As Kirk has surmised, the purpose of the mysterious device is to turn the Enteprise into a “deep freeze;” the Scalosians want to keep the crew in suspended animation so they can come back for replacements after the first round of studs has been used up. Kirk puts the tape into the machine McCoy’s working on, then starts stalling for time. After sabotaging the transporter, he executes the Catspaw Maneuver and starts trying to charm Deela out of her pant (the Scalosians, alas, are so poor that even their queen can only afford one pant leg per slinky costume). He doesn’t succeed in disarming her, but he does manage to get her into his quarters and, all signs indicate, into the sack. Of course Rael busts in and starts a fight, which he loses when Deela zaps him with the special Scalosian zappy thing. Pretending that he’s hit the ‘docile’ stage, Kirk appears eager to leave the ship and be Deela’s love slave for the rest of his short life. Just as they are about to transport down, he grabs her zapping doohickey and legs it into the corridor.   
  
There he meets up with Spock, who has just downed his own glass of Scalosian water. See, Spock figured out that the high-pitched whine is the sound of accelerated speech and movement, and then McCoy found the tape, and they managed to slow it down enough to read the message, and McCoy managed to synthesize an antidote to the water even though the Scalosians have been trying for decades without success, and it hasn’t been tested yet but honey badger don’t care cause he’s badass like that. He and Kirk zap the machine in life support to death. Deela surrenders. Kirk beams her and the rest of the Scalosians back where they came from. Spock gives Kirk a sample of the antidote; he chugs it and goes back to normal, startling Scotty (who has been ‘frozen’ at the entrance to the transporter room for about the past 20 minutes) greatly. Kirk gets back to the bridge; Spock stays accelerated so he can repair the ship at warp-speed. Spock finally decelerates and reappears. The Scalosians are back on the viewscreen; Uhura explains she hit ‘play’ by mistake. Kirk asks her to leave it up while he gazes wistfully at Deela and says “Goodbye.” And off they go. **The End.**  
  
I’m starting to think Season 3 has been undeservingly maligned. Yeah, there are a lot of stinkers; but where circumstances allowed it they made some pretty good shows this season. I’ve always liked “Wink of an Eye.” I never knew that it was really a Gene L. Coon episode, but that makes perfect sense to me. I think the ‘acceleration’ idea is pretty cool, although scientifically it’s hard to see how it could ever work. In fact, I don’t believe this idea was based in science at all; I think it was inspired by the technology Coon was surrounded with as a TV producer. In fact…  
  
Ladies and gentlemen, children of the digital age, allow me to pause for a moment and mark the passage into oblivion of tape. Audiotape, videotape, we even used tape for data storage back in the days of the Commodore 64. The humble cassette tape; the reel-to-reel; the eight-track; the little mini-cassettes for answering machines, VHS and Beta…all gone now, gone where the vinyl’s gone. Who in the next generation will ever know the mingled disappointment and fascination of pulling your favorite video out of the mouth of your VCR only to discover that its flimsy brown entrails are still locked in the VCR’s clenched teeth? Who will know the joy and pain of sticking a pencil through one of those two notched circles and slowly rotating the reel so that the sixty feet of narrow black ribbon that constitutes your most cherished dance party mix may be coaxed with infinite care back back onto the reel imprisoned in that rigid little white box? And moreover, who will know the delight of deliberately monkeying with the fast forward and rewind buttons so that you can send you favorite TV characters into a hysterical gabbling frenzy, or make your best friend’s voice come out sounding like anyone from James Earl Jones to Alvin the Chipmunk? Oh, sure, you can do it all digitally now; but it’s not the same.   
  
I’m not sure “Wink of an Eye” could have been conceived of in a world without tape. From the way it’s worked out in the episode it appears that the Scalosians’ ‘acceleration,’ while it is attributed to a biological cause, behaves more like the fast-forward function. Spock figures out the acceleration thing because he recognizes that high-pitched whine everyone’s been hearing as the sound of a tape being played back at warp speed. He actually tests out his hypothesis by accelerating the tape of the Scalosians’ distress signal until he reproduces the whine. The fact that they refer to those little solid plastic multicolored blocks as “tapes” in the first place shows you how hard it is for people to think beyond the technology they know.  
  
The ‘accelerated’ characters don’t just have faster metabolism and faster reactions; they have a radically different experience of time, which I guess to me is the cool thing about this idea. Basically, two different narratives are unfolding simultaneously, in the same place, but the characters in one can only perceive the characters in the other in a very limited way. In a way, it’s another parallel universe story, except that the other dimension is temoral rather than spatial.  
  
The premise creates some interesting dramatic possibilities and they’re pretty well executed. Kirk is of course preoccupied with the practical problem of saving the Enterprise from the Scalosian menace and his own freedom and identity from Deela’s wiles; but we’re also made to feel the loneliness of this ‘accelerated’ existence, in which Kirk is both surrounded by and separated from the people closest to him. As in “The Tholian Web,” Kirk is essentially a ghost in his own universe; but this time we see it from his perspective, and it’s pretty freaky. Paradoxically, however, the ‘acceleration’ also allows Kirk to slow down; as in “The Paradise Syndrome,” he’s able to get off the temporal treadmill long enough to have…well, if not love, at least some apparently enjoyable sex. (The fact that they’ve done the deed is signified by a shot of Kirk putting his go-go boots back on. By the way, the go-go boots have zippers.) As in “The Enterprise Incident,” Kirk’s romancing of Deela appears to be both business and pleasure; he tells Deela right before she beams out that there’s nothing he’d “rather do” than go with her, and he deliberately lingers over that final image of her. But once again, we’ve got a man being offered happiness as long as he’s willing to be tamed; and Kirk’s not having it. He can’t be having it. It’s the job of a starship captain, apparently, to refuse to surrender any of his individuality or autonomy to domesticity, which as usual appears here as entrapment—or as Kirk says, looking at Deela for confirmation, “Slavery?” Resistance to domestication was a core element of Captain Pike’s character in “The Cage” and it’s just as foundational to Kirk’s. Deela’s most endearing quality is that she understands this about Kirk and grooves on it; she likes the fact that even as he’s making love to her he’s scheming to get the upper hand, and when he starts playing ‘docile’ she’s quite disappointed—though, of course, she’s still not willing to let him go.     
  
Kirk’s thing with Deela is nowhere near as compelling as Spock’s thing with Captain HFV, though. It’s partly, of course, because this happens to him all the time. The list of women that Kirk has romanced in order to save himself, his crew, or his ship includes Andrea (“What Are Little Girls Made Of?”), Marlene (“Mirror, Mirror”), Sylvia (“Catspaw”), Shahna (“Gamesters of Triskelion”), Kelinda (“By Any Other Name”), and Miranda (“By Any Other Name”). That’s nearly twice as long as the list of women Kirk has romanced just for the pleasure of it (Lenore from “Conscience of the King,” Edith Keeler from “City on the Edge of Forever,” and Miramanee from “This Side of Paradise”). In doing this little survey I note that with the exception of Miranda—who is kind of a special case, because Kirk flirts with her for fun first before flirting with her again for strategic reasons—all the women on the first list are aliens, whereas all the women on the second list are human. Drusilla from “Bread and Circuses” is hard to place because Kirk is in captivity when he sleeps with her, but there’s no strategic advantage in doing it. Fascinating.   
  
Anyway, my point is that by now, if you want to interest us in Kirk sexing up an alien spacebabe you need to come up with something special; and Deela really isn’t. I think this can be partly put down to casting. Kathie Browne is very pretty, and she has a charmingly arch little knowing smile; but she seems to be permanently stuck in ‘coy’ mode. It’s not that coy can’t be entertaining; once Kirk starts flirting along, they both seem to enjoy the game, and perhaps my favorite little touch in this episode is the revelation that Kirk has a vanity mirror in _his_ quarters—and an expensive brush and comb set. Deela’s highly amused by this evidence of his vanity, which for her is part of Kirk’s charm; as she tells Rael, she likes Kirk because he’s “pretty.” When it comes to the more dramatic stuff, though, Browne really can’t sell it. Deela’s always soft, even when she’s trying to command, and her despair at the predicament of her own people doesn’t get beyond a kind of gentle weepiness. IMDB’s bio for her mentions that she complained about being typecast as an ingénue; and that’s basically how she plays Deela. It works all right, but you can easily see how this episode would be more interesting if Deela showed a little more of her dark side. As written, Deela is no stranger to despair. Her fatalism about her own situation carries over to her management of Kirk; she lets him do whatever he wants to thwart her, because as she keeps telling him “it won’t make any difference.” Just before Kirk boots her back to Scalos, she tells him that they will now solve “your problem, and ours” by dying—which is pretty bitter, but which with Browne in the role just becomes a resigned sigh.   
  
“Lee Cronin” seems to be playing it pretty much straight this time, though I suspect him of working in a few jokes to delight himself with. One of course would be the vanity in Kirk’s quarters, and the other—which I totally love—is the message the ‘accelerated’ Kirk tapes for Spock. ‘Accelerating’ Kirk is perhaps a joke in itself, because Shatner’s ‘signature’ is his extremely…slow…line delivery, stretched out with Dramatic Pauses and Accentuated Syllables. Kirk knows, of course, that to McCoy and Spock the tape will seem accelerated, so he tries to mitigate this by speaking slowly. Which means that Shatner winds up delivering this speech in a parody of his own style—probably without realizing it. Ah, “Lee Cronin,” you were a devious bastard.  
  
Apart from the premise, what I really like about this episode is the way the team comes together to solve the problem. Split up as they are, they all have to use considerable ingenuity to collaborate, and everyone gets their chance to shine.  (Well, except for Sulu and Chekov, who basically have nothing to do.) We get to enjoy the characters and their rapport with each other, and “Lee Cronin” seems to be enjoying them too. All the familiar quirks are evident but not belabored, and there are some charming character moments, like Kirk’s sudden ‘reappearance’ in Engineering:  
  
 **SCOTTY: Captain! Where did you come from all of a sudden?**  
KIRK: Out of the nowhere into the here.  
SCOTTY: And Mr. Spock, is he comin’ too?  
  
I love Scotty at that moment; he’s still bewildered, but he’s like all right, weird shit happens on the Enterprise and I don’t have to understand it all, tell me what the plan is and let’s go. But my favorite moment is Kirk finding Spock in the corridor after Spock ‘accelerates.’ They don’t say a word to each other; they just exchange glances and charge on down to Life Support. That’s what partnership is: all the shit that doesn’t have to get said cause you just look at each other and you know. There’s another great little moment when Kirk is sending Deela back to Scalos. She tells Kirk it’s his loss because he’ll never be able to get back to his own time. Kirk looks at Spock; Spock looks back; and yeah, Kirk’s not worried about that any more. Cause of course McCoy found the antidote and of course Spock brought it with him cause they’re badass like that. And anyway, even if they hadn't, Kirk could handle this accelerated life as long as he had his honey badger, right?  
  
Rather surprisingly, despite what appear to be lingering tender feelings for Deela, Kirk never tells Deela or the other Scalosians that they’ve discovered the antidote or offers to synthesize it for them. I suppose they don’t necessarily know that it would counteract the sterility; but still, you’d expect them to at least offer it to them once they got the upper hand. Maybe “Lee Cronin” was a little more bitter than Gene Coon was when he wrote “Devil in the Dark” and “Metamorphosis;” or maybe we can attribute that to Arthur Heinemann, who was evidently called in to finish Coon’s script. Heinemann can’t have done that much to it, I figure, because his other two credits are “The Savage Curtain” and “The Way To Eden”—two of the biggest black holes in this part of the galaxy.  
  
Up next: “The Empath.” Batten down the hatches.


	66. THE EMPATH

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I did this review as a series of LOLcats or GIFs or whatever you kids on tumblr call them nowadays. I spend some time talking about "The Empath" with, you know, words, in the review of "Elaan of Troyius."

  
THE EMPATH Written by Joyce Muskat  
To avoid writing a 10,000 word feminist screed nobody wants to read, I did this one in LOLcat. It's image-heavy. But it was the only way.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  


 

 

 

  
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  
   
 

 

  
 

 

  
 

 

  


    

 

  
 

 

  
 

 

  
 

 

 

   
We appear to have entered some kind of antifeminist nebula, because up next is "Elaan of Troius."


	67. ELAAN OF TROYIUS

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This one elicited that screed I was talking about. I did my best to keep it short and make it funny. Also, it includes a handy explanation of the difference between sexism and misogyny.
> 
> After watching this I got interested in France Nuyen and rented _South Pacific._ That was a mistake. Seeing what her big breakout role consisted of gave me a slightly different perspective on her performance in this episode. The role of Elaan, with all its problems, must have been a refreshing change from what she was normally given to do.

**STARDATE: August 16, 2012**

**ELAAN OF TROIUS**  
 **Written by John Meredyth Lucas**  
  
I feel the need…the need for screed.  
  
I will try to keep it short.  
  
 **The Summary:** Kirk is irritated at being ordered by Starfleet to execute some kind of classified mission involving Ellas and Troius, two warring planets in the Iliad System.   
  
OK, It’s not really called the Iliad system. But it might as well be.  
  
The Dolmen of Ellas, whose name is Elaan (because calling her Helen wouldn’t be subtle), has been betrothed to the king of Troyius, and the Enterprise’s job is to carry her there—slowly—so that the Troyian ambassador Petrie will have time to teach her Troyian customs before she arrives. (The Troyians are cultured and suave and the Ellasians are warlike and barbaric, see.) The Dolmen shows up, and she is a raging bitch. She orders everyone around, she yells, she throws things, she pitches a hissy fit about the quarters Uhura was nice enough to give up to her, and when Kirk, having survived a rather hostile encounter with her, tells ambassador Petrie that like all raging bitches what she really wants is a strong man to take her in hand, and Petrie follows Kirk’s advice, she stabs Petrie in the back. Down in sickbay, McCoy reports that Petrie will live; but Petrie refuses to resume his duties. He does inform Chapel and McCoy that the way Ellasian women get dudes despite being raging bitches is that their tears contain some kind of chemical that drives any man who is touched by them mad with desire…forever. Kirk conveniently does not hear this because he’s talking to Uhura. Oh, by the way, there’s a Klingon ship following them. Nobody knows why.  
  
While Petrie recovers, Kirk takes over his job. Their first session doesn’t go too well. To get into her room for the second session he has to get Spock to ambush and stun her personal guard. After another hostile encounter, the enraged Elaan suddenly bursts into tears and admits that she wants Kirk to teach her “how to make people like me.” Kirk feels sorry for her and wipes away her tears. OH NOES!  
  
Well, while Kirk and Elaan are making love like crazed weasels, Uhura figures out there’s a transmission going to the Klingon ship from inside the Enterprise. Kirk breaks away long enough to find Elaan’s henchman Kryton down in Engineering. He’s clearly fucked something up, but they don’t know what yet; when Kirk calls Spock down to do the ol’ mind-meld Kryton immolates himself.  
  
So, Kirk talks to Elaan about this, and of course there’s more you love me/but my duty what of my duty/but I’m so hot/yeah I guess you are, and Spock and McCoy walk in on the two of them in a hot clinch. Out in the corridor McCoy explains about the tears. Kirk says he’s gonna need an antidote.   
  
Well, the Klingons are getting ready to attack, and just as Kirk’s about to warp out Scotty calls up: turns out Kryton rigged the matter/antimatter drives to blow up as soon as they engage warp speed. Crap. Also the dilithium crystals are totally fused. Double crap. And now the Klingons are firing on them, AND Elaan insists on coming onto the bridge. Triple and quadruple crap. Kirk hustles Elaan down to sickbay, supposedly for her safety. In sickbay, Petrie says look, we’re all gonna die, would you maybe please wear the wedding gifts I brought you for one minute?  
  
Elaan puts on the dress and the necklace and heads back to the bridge. Spock figures out that her necklace is made out of dilithium crystals. The fact that dilithium crystals are so copiously abundant on Troyius that people are making jewelry out of them explains to everyone why the Klingons are sabotaging the mission. Elaan graciously agrees to let them use her bling as fuel. Spock brings ‘em on down to engineering. Between them and Sulu’s fancy flyin’ n’ firin’ they manage to fight off the Klingon ship.  
  
Elaan, wearing her slightly less blingy dilithium necklace, and Petrie and her remaining henchman transport down to Troius. McCoy busts onto the bridge and reports that at long last he has synthesized the antidote. Spock says Kirk doesn’t need it cause the antidote is the Enterprise. McCoy agrees. **The End.**  
  
So, as we get deeper into the antifeminist nebula, we move from the Sexism System into the Misogyny Cluster.  
  
Both terms and widely and loosely used, so let me explain how I’m using them. To be sexist is to make stereotyped assumptions about people based on gender. To be a misogynist is to despise women in the abstract and categorically.   
  
Sexism is pervasive and insidious and often infects the hearts and minds of otherwise decent people. You don’t have to hate women to be a sexist; it is only necessary that you have been infected with patriarchal bullshit. Maybe you don’t realize you’re infected; or maybe you do realize it but you don’t want to cure yourself because it would cost you something.   
  
You don’t have to be a man to be sexist either. Take “The Empath,” for instance. It’s our third over-the-transom episode written by a female fan of the show. (I’m counting “Tholian Web” on the assumption that since it was the wife who went on to have a career in TV, the husband’s contribution was probably negligible.) Joyce Muskat produced one of the most sexist episodes of Star Trek TOS—and as we’ve seen, that’s up against some pretty stiff competition—because she was infected by the idea that you become a ‘good’ woman by patiently suffering, obeying the unreasonable demands of the wise men who control you, being sensitive to others, evacuating your own emotions so you can become a receptacle for the pain of men, never articulating your own needs or desires, sacrificing yourself, and in general treating yourself as if you are worth less than anybody with a Y chromosome. The Vions claim that she learned some typically ‘masculine’ virtues—courage, will to live, etc.—from watching Kirk, Spock, and McCoy; but since she evidently could not find them in herself (the Vions treat her as if she is a tabula rasa) and since she can only express these virtues by attempting to destroy herself, this does not dilute the sexism.  
  
But here is my point: “The Empath” is sexist, but it’s not misogynist. Gem is not given these traits so that she can be ridiculed or loathed or despised. These traits are coded as Good, and Gem is a saint. She is after all literally awesome. The very fact that she embodies all of the most stereotypical and disabling aspects of feminine ‘virtue’ is what makes her special, unique, the ‘pearl of great price,’ and the most important character both in her universe and in the episode. (That is also what makes this episode peerlessly pukeworthy.) At one point, Kirk grabs her—gently; everyone’s very tender with Gem—and says, “Is this all being done…for you?” Yes, it is; and that is what makes Gem a Mary Sue. I mean apart from her being beautiful and mysterious and intriguing and super-special to all three of our heroes. All the men love, respect, and honor her—even those Vion bastards.  
  
“Elaan of Troius” is straight-up misogyny with a sidecar of racism. In addition to providing us with hilarious one-liners about how much of a pain in the ass women are—“The women of your planet, Mr. Spock, are logical. That is the only planet in the galaxy that can make that claim”—it favors its central female character with epithets like “spoiled brat,” “monster,” “child,” and “savage.” I’m sure it was only the FCC standards that kept anyone from calling her a bitch or breaking out the C-word (no, not “curst;” the other one). It’s true that Ellasian men are supposed to be “vicious and arrogant” too; but since all the Ellasian men we see are Elaan’s creatures and are dressed like the opening float of a Valentine’s Day parade (seriously, I don’t think that what those crotch-length red manvelopes are made of even counts as fabric; it looks to me like some kind of semi-rigid plastic) none of them can hold a candle to Elaan’s viciousness and arrogance. Oh, and did I mention that the Ellasians are dark-skinned—rather unevenly; sometimes the men appear to be wearing darkening makeup and sometimes they appear merely tanned—and that Elaan wears a wig and makeup strongly reminiscent of Cleopatra? (This would not be necessary merely to distinguish Ellasians from Troyians, because Troyians are green.) So all the stuff about how she needs to be “civilized” does double duty as both racist imperialist bullshit AND patriarchal misogynist bullshit.  
  
In fact, what makes Elaan ‘uncivilized’ is also what makes her unfeminine—which I have to say is about the only thing I like about her. She eats with her fingers, tears into a chicken leg in a manner that would make Henry VIII proud, spits, and swigs Saurian brandy straight from the bottle just like Evil Kirk. She hates Uhura’s quarters not because they’re not sumptuous enough, but because they’re too girly: “Am I a soft Troyian faun to need pillows to sit on? And these ridiculous female trappings—they are an offense to my eyes.” Honey, believe me, if I had to live on a set dressed by these guys I’d feel the same way. But you understand that all the diva behavior totally undermines your butch persona, right?   
  
Elaan, in fact, is the anti-Gem—and boy does this episode hate her for it. Although it also thinks she’s super-hot. Like all women, really. So annoying…so irrational…so selfish…so cruel…so brainless…so childish…you wouldn’t spend a single minute in the company of one of these creatures if they weren’t so goddamn HOT! And God help you if you get close to one, because she’ll cry on you, and then you’ll get girl cooties from her _feelings_ and your BALLS will FALL OFF!  
  
Unless you are James T. Kirk, of course. Cause in that case, you, and you alone, have the balls to tame this shrew! Here’s a transcript of his first ‘lesson’ in her quarters:  
  
 **ELAAN: Tell me, what can you teach me?**  
 **KIRK: Table manners, for one thing. This is a plate. It contains food. This is a knife. It cuts the food. This is a glass—**  
 **ELAAN: Leave me!**  
 **KIRK: Like it or not, you’re gonna learn what you’ve been ordered to learn!**  
 **ELAAN: You will return me to Ellas immediately.**  
 **KIRK: That’s impossible.**  
 **ELAAN: Everything I order is possible.**  
 **KIRK: That’s the first problem we’re gonna work on. If you want to enjoy the privileges and prerogatives of being a Dolmen, then start being worthy of it. If you don’t want the responsibilities that go with the title, give it up!**  
 **ELAAN: Nobody speaks to me that way.**  
 **KIRK: That’s another one of your problems. Nobody’s told you that you’re an uncivilized savage. A vicious child in a woman’s body. An arrogant monster!**  
  
And then she slaps him; and then he belts her. And then he says, “That’s no way to treat someone who’s telling you the truth.” Really, you can hardly blame her for throwing a knife at him as he walks away. I would.  
  
The second session’s even better. He barges in, struggles with her on the bed while asking if she’s going to “behave” (true, she is trying to knife him; but then he did stun her bodyguards and invade her quarters even though he knows she doesn’t want him there), and then this happens:  
  
 **ELAAN: You are warned, captain, never to touch me again.**  
 **KIRK: If I touch you again, your glory, it’ll be to administer an ancient Earth custom called a spanking—a form of punishment administered to spoiled brats.**  
  
 **[she says she wants him to teach her “how to make people like me” and cries; Kirk touches her magic twinkly tears; they kiss; and then:]**  
  
 **ELAAN: Captain, that ancient earth custom called spanking…what is it?**  
 **KIRK: It’s a…it’s a…we’ll talk about it later. [clinch]**  
  
Dude, WHERE are the paranoid bellybutton-hating no-interracial-snogging network execs when you need them? Probably watching the rough cut and fantasizing about spankings. By the way, Elaan is neither light-skinned nor human, and the actress playing her is French-Vietnamese, but apparently their sucking face lustily and repeatedly didn’t bother anyone; so this episode is more evidence that the OMGWTFBBQINTERRACIAL anxieties were reserved for clinches containing persons of African descent.   
  
Said actress is France Nuyen, and she is the only watchable thing about this episode. She had quite a career under her belt already, including the role of Liat in the 1958 film of _South Pacific_. According to IMDB, her breakout performance was on Broadway in 1958 in the title role of “The World of Suzie Wong,” in which she played a prostitute opposite…wait for it…William Shatner. Perhaps she agreed to take this role as a favor to him. I would gladly be watching her in something less rage-honing; but even here, she manages to spin crap into…well, not gold exactly, nobody could do that, but something that is not pure crap. Theissed up as she is, she commits to Elaan’s take-no-prisoners physicality, and with her Presence and capriciousness and accent and somewhat androgynous hotness she almost has a Marlene Dietrich thing going on. I will admit that pre-tears there is a certain sizzle to her scenes with Kirk, especially when she’s got the upper hand.   
  
Post-tears, well, the kissing stuff is actually a lot more compelling than most of Kirk’s spacebabe clinches; who knows, maybe developing chemistry with another actor is like riding a bicycle. But since chemistry is all there is to Kirk and Elaan, watching them together gets boring fast. Kirk never actually gets to like Elaan, who is not allowed to grow; she winds up resigning herself to her fate but she still hates the whole idea of having “responsibilities.” Not only does it all become the same struggle between love and duty that we’re always watching with that guy, but love doesn’t put up much of a fight. That “Canutu woman” and her enchantoplant from “A Private Little War” did a much better job of clouding Kirk’s judgment than Elaan ever does. True, it’s a little embarrassing to be walked in on by Spock and McCoy, but Our Hero never really wavers in his devotion to the Enterprise—who, as Spock points out, ‘infected’ Kirk first.  
  
I could, if I wanted to, argue that Elaan’s most unappetizing characteristics are merely the expression of a powerful woman’s frustration at being powerless to affect her own destiny; after all, it’s always clear that what’s _really_ eating her is having to go live on a hated planet among hated people married to a guy she doesn’t even know but figures she’ll probably hate. No amount of thrown crockery will alter that fact, though she does try to manipulate the tears-enslaved Kirk to thwart the marriage. But you know what, this isn’t _Hedda Gabler_ ; it’s just a bunch of guys entertaining themselves. That would be slightly less rage-honing were it not for the obvious fact that large parts of it are ripped off from two episodes written by a woman. The Klingon-intrigue plot is practically a straight steal from D.C. Fontana’s “Journey to Babel,” where (as in this episode) it all takes place in the context of a diplomatic mission. The Kirk/Elaan relationship reworks the McCoy/Eleen relationship from another Fontana confection, “Friday’s Child,” right down to the woman’s name and the she hits/he hits/I love him choreography. (IMDB informs me that Nuyen, who is now a counselor for abused children and battered women, is a survivor of child abuse, which must have made shooting her scenes with Shatner that much more irksome.)    
  
When a Star Trek episode is in the toilet, you get hung up on the kind of sloppiness that you pass over in the ones you like. In this case, I got pissed off over the way Lucas handles the deus ex jewelry ending, which asks us to believe 1) that Spock, Kirk, et al. cannot recognize a dilithium crystal in the raw 2) that nobody in the Federation has figured out that dilithium crystals are ‘common stones’ in this system 3) that although Elaan doesn't know a dilithium crystal from a sparkly rock, Kryton is capable of sophisticated sabotage involving the matter/antimatter drives and the dilithium crystals and 4) that despite these crystals being “common stones,” they have been fashioned into a necklace Petrie describes as the most prized and coveted of royal jewels. But I digress.  
  
There are only two things about this episode, apart from France Nuyen, that are good. One is the final confrontation with the Klingon ship, in which we finally see why they pay Sulu the big bucks, and which is made tactically interesting in a way that creates some decent suspense. The other is a genuinely funny running gag about McCoy and his antidotes. While Kirk is mastering his passions as best he can, McCoy is working frantically on finding a biochemical agent that can counteract the crying cooties. Petrie assures him that Ellasians have been trying for years and that he’s wasting his time; McCoy says, well, it’s my time to waste. Finally! The breakthrough! McCoy has done the impossible once again! He runs his antidote up to the bridge, so full of excitement and the joy of medical discovery that he starts gushing about it all to Spock! And…nobody cares!  
  
Ah well. On we go. Up next: “Whom Gods Destroy, They First Imprison In The Set Left Over From Dagger Of The Mind.”


	68. WHOM GODS DESTROY

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another Double Kirk episode.

**STARDATE: August 17, 2012**

**WHOM GODS DESTROY**  
 **Written by Lee Erwin from a story by Lee Erwin and Jerry Sohl**  
  
Also known under its working title, “You Don’t Have To Be Crazy To Be A Starship Captain…But It Helps!”  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise is taking a supply of a revolutionary new medicine to an asylum for the incurably insane located on a planet named—it really is—Elba, which has a poisonous atmosphere. Kirk and Spock beam down with the drugs and are met by Dr. Cory, the asylum director, who seems unusually chipper for a guy who spends his entire life on a poison planet looking after the 15 remaining individuals in the galaxy who are totally and irrevocably MAAAAAAAAAAAAAD. All is going well until Dr. Cory shows them to the cell occupied by Garth of Izar, a legendary Starfleet military commander whose exploits are still required reading at Starfleet Academy. On the way there, Kirk is accosted by a green-skinned woman named Marta who informs him that the man he’s with “is not really Dr. Cory at all.” Kirk figures, well, Marta’s locked up here for a reason, and continues on. Kirk sees that the guy in Garth’s cell looks just like Dr. Cory. In the twinkling of an eye, Kirk discovers that the guy in the cell is Cory, the guy in the hall with him is really Garth, and he is now locked up in the cell with the real Dr. Cory while Garth releases all the other inmates, has Spock dragged off, and scampers down the hall with Marta wiggling and giggling on his arm.  
  
Kirk learns from the real Dr. Cory that Garth was severely damaged in an accident and was taught by the benevolent inhabitants of some planet or other how to regenerate his own cells, which skill he managed to parlay into the ability to shape-shift. (These “cellular regeneration techniques” must be some serious shit, since they also enable him to generate the clothing and boots of the person he is shifting into.) Garth has also developed a superpowerful explosive capable of taking out the galaxy, and now he’s on his way with his army of lunatics to try to take command of the Enterprise.  
  
Unfortunately for Garth, after the disaster on [Tantalus](http://idairsauthor.livejournal.com/40523.html) someone—probably Spock—evidently instituted an Asylum Visit Beamup Protocol. When Garth, as “Kirk,” asks Scotty to beam him up, Scotty says sure thing captain, queen to queen’s level three. When, at long last, it dawns on Garth that this is the sign and he’s supposed to give the countersign, he cuts off communication and throws an epic tantrum. Resuming his own shape, he sets about trying to pry the countersign out of Kirk. First he invites Spock and Kirk to dinner, where Marta recites ‘her’ poetry and dances. Then they bring out a comfy chair and put Cory in it. Of course it has been rigged to do something extremely painful, and watching Cory tortured by it prompts Kirk to scream for them to call it off.  
  
However, he still won’t give the countersign, so next Garth puts Kirk himself in the chair and turns it up to 11. Well, Kirk by now has been tortured so goddamn often that some bullshit sonic wave device isn’t gonna break him. He wakes up in a bedroom with Marta fawning all over him. Marta promises to help him because she’s in love with him; he believes her, but only really perks up when she mentions that she’s arranged for Spock to meet them. Marta grabs a knife and tries to kill Kirk, but Spock shows up and disarms her. Kirk and Spock run down to the transporter room and contact Scotty; but surprise! When Kirk, who was not born yesterday, asks Spock to give the countersign, “Spock” morphs back into Garth. Kirk makes a stab at lowering the forcefield around the dome but Garth stuns his ass.  
  
Next thing Kirk knows he’s being drafted into the role of “crown prince” at Garth’s coronation. After the ceremony he’s hauled back to the control room to watch Garth test his super-explosive on Marta, who’s been thrown out into the poisonous atmosphere. She goes boom. This finally emboldens Scotty, who of course has long known that something’s fucked up down there, to try blasting a hole in the forcefield on the far side of the planet so they can maybe go down and grab Kirk and honey badger. Meanwhile Garth has decided to bring Spock to the party, but Spock fakes stunned and nerve-pinches both of Garth’s goons. When he arrives at the control room, however, Garth has morphed into Kirk, so Spock now has to figure out which Kirk to stun. He eventually shoots the Kirk who’s trying to brain the other Kirk with the chair. Bingo!  
  
All is well, Cory is back in charge, and McCoy’s down there helping him administer the medicine (you’d think they might have brought him down on the original trip, but I suppose he was working on an antidote to something). Garth has been going through some of this medical therapy and he appears to be ‘improving,’ though he also seems kind of lobotomized and doesn’t appear to remember any of the rest of the episode. Spock explains to Kirk how he figured out who to shoot. Kirk finds the explanation unflattering and says King Solomon would not have approved. **The End.**  
  
Ah, this takes me back. Asylums for the criminally insane…double Kirks…the fallen idol whose works Kirk studied eagerly at Starfleet Academy…Jerry Sohl getting a writing credit…dancing green Orion animal slave women…it’s Season One all over again. What a pity that it’s Season Three.  
  
Back in Season One it seemed like creating an evil doppelganger for Kirk was a competitive sport; oddly enough we got through Season Two without a single one (not counting “Mirror, Mirror”). Seems like maybe it’s not a good sign that this device is making a comeback. And in fact everything about this episode feels kind of shopworn. How obvious is it that “Whom Gods Destroy” is a retread of “Dagger of the Mind?” Well, Garth’s looney goons wheel out the chair for Cory, and Garth says, “I’m sure you recognize this, Captain,” and it looks for a minute like he’s going to say, “Yes, it’s the chair I was sitting in when they fucking neural neutralized me down on Tantalus.” (What he does say is something along the lines of “yes, it is a benign piece of equipment which has helped many men.”) Similarly, Marta is not explicitly labeled a green animal Orion slave woman; but she’s made up and costumed like one, she’s certainly animalistic, and she does the same lame pseudo-bellydancing where she waves her limbs around like crazy in hopes that Bruno Tonioli will be too distracted by her appendages to complain about her lack of hip action  
  
When “Dagger of the Mind” showed up in Season One [I hailed it with joy](http://idairsauthor.livejournal.com/40523.html) as an early example of “what _Star Trek_ does when it works.” Two seasons later, we know the cast and the writers can, under the right conditions, do better. Alas, “Whom Gods Destroy” pales in comparison to its Season One doppelganger.  
  
The major problem lies in the approach to the asylum setting. Representations of madness in literature can be divided broadly into two categories: realistic attempts to represent specific mental illnesses, and what I call Literary Madness. Literary Madness is mostly or purely conventional and/or symbolic. Typically characters go Literary Mad either because they have come too close to the divine/demonic (weave a circle round him thrice and RUN THE FUCK AWAY), because they have experienced some kind of identity-destroying trauma (such as discovering that you gave away your kingdom to the wrong two daughters and now they’re putting your kingly ass out on the heath), or because they have committed an unspeakable crime (such as killing your mother because she killed your father). Literary Madfolk may be delusional (out, damn spot!), obsessive (WHIIIIITE WHAAAAAALE!), willfully divorced from reality (I have always depended on the kindness of strangers), or violent (burn, Thornfield, BUUUURN!); but whatever form Literary Madness takes, it, like most Literary Disabilities, is a symbolic representation either of something that is deficient/out of balance/flawed about the character, or some aspect of the human condition. For women, going Literary Mad often happens as a result of either sexual violence or the loss of a loved one (typically a child, lover, or husband) and it is often expressed as sexual incontinence. Popular culture has developed Literary Madness into a special form we might call Supervillain Syndrome, where Madness is basically just amped-up ambition, usually expressed as a desire for world domination. Anyway. My point is that there is a wide gulf between Literary Madness and mental illness as we experience it here in the real world.  
  
Coexisting with these two categories is a third you might call Institutionalized Madness, in which the characters designated and incarcerated as mad are actually sane people trapped in a royally fucked-up society. In this subgenre the focus is on the institution’s attempt to ‘cure’ the individual (by crushing him and rebuilding him) and the individual’s struggle with the mental institution and the repressive social apparatus for which it stands.  
  
So. Both “Dagger of the Mind” and “Whom Gods Destroy” give only a very foggy idea of what mental illness means in the future; in both cases the “incurably insane” stand in for that one nagging problem that utopian societies always fail to solve. But “Dagger of the Mind” belongs to the third category: the adversary is not the inmates, but the asylum itself. The villain is a doctor, not a patient; weapon is a therapeutic technique—the “neural neutralizer”—and the threat is not to Kirk’s life or to his ship but to his sanity. So even though we don’t actually know what kind of madness we’re dealing with here because we see very little of the non-neural-neutralized inmates, “Dagger of the Mind” is scary and, in its way, real (though of course not realistic), because it hooks into common modern anxieties about institutional control and the fragility of human identity and individuality.  
  
“Whom Gods Destroy” doesn’t care about the asylum except as a place for Kirk and Spock to escape from. Basically this is an action plot which could take place in any kind of well-guarded and isolated holding facility—a prison, a POW camp, a supervillain’s lair, Guantanamo Bay, etc.—and the fact that Garth and all his followers are MAAAAAAD  is basically just a way to dress up the escape plot to make it a little more interesting. Sadly, Sohl and Erwin are working out of a pretty old and beat-up bag of Literary Madness tricks. There are two set pieces built around the whole Lord of Misrule thing where we have to spend a lot of time watching the inmates cavort in Lord Garth’s crazy court; but whereas this Terrifying Inversion of the Natural Order of Things might have freaked out Elizabethans at the Globe back in the day (Ihnat’s approach to Crazy Garth is very Royal Shakespeare Company, and the soundtrack during both the ‘court’ scenes sounds like incidental music for _Henry V_ ), to us it’s not scary. And after “Plato’s Stepchildren,” really, it’s nowhere near weird enough to freak anyone out. It’s just boring. Both set pieces go on forever and neither discernibly advances the plot. The time could have been better spent on developing the actually psychological aspects of the plot, like Kirk's dismay at being faced with a guy he admired and identify with who is now totally MAAAAAD, and with whom he may actually have a little too much in common.  
  
The episode is very inconsistent about Garth’s Madness. There’s nothing much wrong with him apart from being a supervillain; and he and Kirk get into a long argument about Starfleet’s transition away from a military to a peacetime operation in which it is implied that Garth’s problem is simply that he was not willing to give up military conquest after it was no longer “necessary.” That would kind of be interesting, in that it would raise the question of whether ambition/ruthlessness/mass-murdering are really forms of Madness or just business as usual for a starship captain under the old pre-pacifist Starfleet regime. But Sohl and Erwin are only superficially interested in that quesiton, and this story is undermined by a common supervillain narrative in which the experience of being severely mutilated in an accident causes him to go MAAAAAD. That seems to be the one they’re ratifying at the end, when the revolutionary new medicine causes him to completely forget Mad Garth and revert to a tranquilized and amnesiac version of his pre-madness self.   
  
Marta, well, she’s a young and attractive woman and she’s Literary Mad, so naturally she’s a nymphomaniac who kills her lovers to “ensure permanent male fidelity.” It is kind of a cruel touch to give her literary pretensions and then mock them—she recites “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (Shakespeare again) and claims to have written it—and it’s maybe a little weird when you realize that’s Batgirl (Yvonne Craig) under there. But otherwise she’s basically a bundle of the most common Literary Madwoman stereotypes and it’s no surprise to me that the producers looked at this and thought, “Hey, do we still have any of that green animal Orion slave woman body paint?”  
  
The plot is in general a lot weaker than “Dagger of the Mind’s,” especially in the way it handles the people stuck on the Enterprise. In “Dagger of the Mind,” McCoy and Spock are working on the same problem Kirk and Noel are working, and S. Bar-David does a great job of intertwining the two teams. In “Whom Gods Destroy,” Scotty et al. basically sit there wringing their hands for a while and then finally decide to take an action which winds up having no effect on the resolution. The acting is also weak. This episode was directed by Herb Wallerstein, who was the "fireman" called in to finish off "Tholian Web" after Senensky got fired. A "fireman," I learn from Senensky's website, was the industry term for a director who could be counted on to just get the shit filmed on time without worrying about such things as quality. Wallerstein also directed "Turnabout Intruder." Enough said about that, perhaps. Weak direction could explain a lot about this episode, including the fact that Mad Garth has a certain charisma but a very narrow range, and Marta is pretty wack but too ditzy to register as a femme fatale.  
  
The sole and only effective thing about this episode, in fact, is Spock’s Double Kirk Dilemma. They do a good job of confusing the viewer—because of the way it’s edited, you can’t tell which one is ‘real’ once the doors open, and during the tussle they change positions so often you couldn’t keep track anyway, except for the fact that it’s usually clear that only one of the people in that tussle is actually William Shatner—but honey badger has this shit handled. He tries asking Kirk things only he would know, but that doesn't work; instead of freaking out, he adopts a new strategy which is eminently logical: Garth must be using up a lot of energy pretending to be Kirk, and “I have time,” so I’ll just pull up a chair. That strategy is aborted when Garthkirk starts the rumble. No problem. Honey badger resolves it with the classic Split The Baby Maneuver: the Kirk who cares more about the Enterprise than about himself is the real one. Their wrap-up conversation is classic, with Spock snarking on Kirk without acknowledging that he's doing it: “I was waiting for a victor in the hand-to-hand combat. I assumed it would be Garth. [beat] Because of your weakened condition.” Kirk is annoyed, of course, but also a little hurt that Spock's mystical connection to his soul allowed for even momentary uncertainty about who was who. Nimoy, meanwhile, does a great job with Spock’s reactions to the DKD: he’s wary, and a little weirded out at not being able to tell That Man On the Bridge from Captain Crazycakes; but as unsettling as this uncertainty is, he’s always confident that he’ll resolve it. That part really does play to the strengths the show has been building up all this time; and that’s the part that works.  
  
Mostly, though, “Whom Gods Destroy?” is just lame. Ah well, up next… “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield.”


	69. LET THAT BE YOUR LAST BATTLEFIELD

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A classic episode if there ever was one--cheesiness included.
> 
> I would like here to salute Memory Alpha, whose entry on LTBYTLB does a great job of explaining how collaboration and production constraints affected the finished product. And with all the things that went wrong, we have to salute them for rolling this one out in 1968.

**STARDATE: August 23, 2012**

**LET THAT BE YOUR LAST BATTLEFIELD**  
 **Written by Oliver Crawford from a story by “Lee Cronin”**  
  
In which a director and producer team up to transform Stilton into Velveeta.  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise is on its way to the planet Arianus, which has been afflicted by a deadly germ of some kind and needs to be “decontaminated” on a planetary scale. They encounter a hot Federation shuttlecraft which was stolen from Starbase 4. They tractor-beam the shuttlecraft aboard and discover that its occupant, in addition to being nearly dead from suffocation, is…TWO DIFFERENT COLORS! Seriously, his face looks like a black and white cookie: on one side it’s completely black and on the other side of a straight line running down his face he’s completely white. Presumably it goes all the way down, though as a gesture of mercy toward the makeup team Theiss has kitted him out with a full bodysuit and gloves.  
  
Well, Lokai, once he recovers, is most offended by Kirk calling him a thief; from his POV he didn’t steal the shuttlecraft, he took it because his need gave him the right to it. Kirk tells him he can explain it all at Starbase 4. But lo, there is another small craft! It is…invisible! But it’s headed right at them! Only it disintegrates yet somehow ‘deposits’ its occupant on board. Who is…wait for it…TWO DIFFERENT COLORS!  
  
This guy’s name is Bele; and he is Lokai’s very own Inspector Javert. Bele claims to have been in pursuit of Lokai for 50,000 years. Bele naturally wants to take Lokai back to the planet Charon (no way? sadly, way). Kirk wants everyone to just shut up and go to Arianus and thence to Starbase 4 where there are bureaucrats who get paid to handle this bullshit.  
  
Bele disagrees. So he, with his ‘will,’ takes control of the ship and sends it hurtling at Warp 10 toward Charon. Nobody can get navigational control back, so Kirk decides that if Bele won’t give him back control of the Enterprise, he’ll blow it up. He calls up the computer and starts the self-destruct sequence. At the very last possible second, Bele finally caves. Control of the helm returns to Kirk; they head off to Arianus. Kirk gives Bele and Lokai the run of the ship during the journey, hoping that by interacting with the crew they might learn more about “monochrome” humans and maybe chill the fuck out.  
  
Fat chance. Lokai spends all his time making rabble-rousing speeches in the rec room while Bele hangs out in the captain’s quarters explaining patiently to Kirk and Spock, who have made the grave error of assuming that Lokai and Bele are racially identical, that Lokai is white on the _right_ side while Bele is white on the _left_ side. Spock, flabbergasted to discover a species in the galaxy more illogical than humans, tries explaining how Vulcan got past all this but to no avail. Once the Arianus mission is over, Bele burns out the computer’s self-destructy circuits and the navigational control, and off they go toward Charon.  
  
Well, when they get in orbit around Charon, they discover that during the 50,000 years that Bele spent chasing Lokai, Charon had itself more than a taste of Armageddon. Sentient life is extinct, the cities are dead, piles of unburied corpses litter the thoroughfares…there’s nothing left alive except for plants and the lower animals. Kirk tries to convince Bele and Lokai to bury the hatchet, since all they know and love is dead…but no. Lokai charges off the bridge. Bele follows. They both transport down to the surface, where they will no doubt chase each other until either they kill each other or they both die from exhaustion. “Do you suppose,” says Uhura, that hate “is all they ever had?” “No,” says Kirk, “but it’s all they have left.” **The End.**  
  
This is the last of the “Lee Cronin” episodes. “Lee Cronin” has become, for me, the most enigmatic figure in the history of this show. Oh mysterious and silent Lee Cronin…are you ever for real? How can we know? Was this supposed to be a good episode or a bad episode? Your old pal Ralph Senensky says that your earthly avatar Gene L. Coon was very interested in racial politics, going so far as to suggest that “Metamorphosis” might be a coded story about interracial sexuality. Could it be that this was a good script before Crawford and Fred Freiberger got to it? So says one Daniel Ralph, another visitor to Senensky’s website. Or is this just another Spock’s Brain-sized joke?  
  
In search of enlightenment I traveled to [Memory Alpha,](http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Let_That_Be_Your_Last_Battlefield_\(episode\)) where I was informed of the following:  
  
1) Coon’s script was originally titled “Portrait in Black and White” and was rejected by the brass hats when he submitted it for Season One. In Season Three, however, things got so bad they had to go fishing in the circular file. This lends some support to my speculation that “Specter of the Gun” was a season one script that Coon shelved at first because it wasn’t good enough. Why did the brass hats not like PIB&W? Memory Alpha does not say, but it MAY be because at least according to them, the original concept was that one was an angel and one was a devil, “with a tail.” That would explain the 50,000 year pursuit, which strikes me as implausibly long for a species which appears to be advanced but not immortal.  
  
2) The bicolor idea was evidently suggested by Jud Taylor, the director. Makeup must have cursed his black-and-white hearted soul.   
  
3) Producer Fred Freiburger was apparently very proud of this episode. Well, to each his own.  
  
All right, so, it looks as if it was straight-up on Coon’s part, and then the other cooks went to work on his recipe and we wound up with this. And I will say this: “Let That Be Your Last Battlfield” is in fact a classic. It is an essential piece of the Star Trek experience, and very much in keeping with the earnest attempts at being progressive that so endear the show to me. Allegory always has a whiff of fermented curds about it; but the cheese continuum is a long one, and there’s a big difference between Stilton and Velveeta. This script might have been fine cheese when it was fed to the Crawford/Taylor/Freiberger machine…but it sure came out nasty.  
  
As far as the treatment of race goes, all the biggest problems are visible in that half-black half-white makeup. It’s not just that they see the problem of racial oppression as “black and white” (heh heh) when it is in fact more nuanced. The point of the bicolor thing is to get to the punch line Bele delivers in that late-night bull session with Kirk and Spock—during which, I would like to point out, there is more booze on that tiny table than we have seen in one place since this show began. Vulcans don’t drink; so either Bele can really knock it back, or Kirk couldn’t stand to interact with him without being well anesthetized. Anyway, the punch line is that the enormous and all-important racial difference that Bele perceives between himself and Lokai is not only irrelevant but invisible to everyone else. Clearly the intended message is that racial difference doesn’t ‘matter;’ the differences in pigmentation over which America is tearing itself apart are as incidental and irrelevant as this crazy half-black half-white stuff. Since the visible differences are trivial and meaningless, Lokai and Bele must really be the same under their two-toned skin. The episode emphasizes this by costuming Lokai and Bele identically except for a chain detail on Bele’s collar that must indicate his official status somehow. And that, Star Trek viewers, is why racism is irrational.  
  
I am down with that idea; it is basically the basic premise of contemporary critical race theory, which argues that all racial distinctions are social constructs with no essential basis whatsoever, and that absent the social context that makes race ‘matter,’ race would cease to exist as a category because we would cease to attribute meaning to the criteria that define it. But the risk you take when you make that argument is that the whole “we’re all really the same” thing can easily turn into a way to erase the real differences that separate the experience and the responsibilities of being an oppressor from the experience and the responsibilities of being oppressed. It doesn’t matter if the physical distinction is biologically irrelevant; if it has become the basis for your entire social identity—as race, in a racist society, does—then it ‘matters’ plenty. Crawford’s script does approach this idea by having Lokai blather at Chekov and Sulu about how Bele’s persecution of Lokai forces him to engage in the kind of irrational, hotheaded behavior that simply confirms Bele’s perception of him as a “madman.”  
  
What undoes whatever good work is going on in that paragraph is the fact that as characters, Lokai and Bele are drawn as two of a kind—and it’s a whining, grating, bombastic, obnoxious, unbelievably annoying kind. The result is that everyone in the episode—and, no doubt, most of the viewers—just says “A plague on both your houses!” and washes their hands of both of them. And this is the insidious part of the “we’re all the same under the skin” argument: because the person articulating the grievances of the oppressed is just as much of an asshole as the person who oppresses him, we are encouraged to say, “well, they’re both wrong, and they’re as bad as each other.” Well, I’m sorry, but they are not. The oppressor is wrong. The oppressed may not be a fun time at parties; but when he says that what’s happening to him is unfair, he is right. The oppressor is doing something wrong and has the power to stop it and doesn’t. This, to me, is worse than complaining about how you are oppressed and don’t have the power to change it. The fact that hatred is dangerous and wrong does not cancel out the extra wrongness of systematic, structural, deliberate oppression—which Bele’s people have clearly engineered on Charon.  
  
But everything about the way the episode looks drives us to equate Bele with Lokai, and therefore to equate the resentment of the oppressed with the bigotry of the oppressors. Because they look identical to us except for that one trivial difference, we don’t _see_ any of the oppression that Lokai is always whining about. Bele is not, for instance, any better-nourished than Lokai. If we are to assume that they’re still wearing what they had on 50,000 years ago, then Bele’s people aren’t any better-dressed than Lokai’s people. They appear to both be about equally articulate, which suggests some parity in education. So it seems as if the only consequence of Bele’s racism is Lokai’s hatred, whereas if any of what Lokai describes is true, you would expect there to be other much more material consequences. All this erases what I think is a significant difference. The resentment of the oppressed is created by oppression, not by some spontaneous urge toward hatred. The bigotry of the oppressor…well, we could argue for a long time about what generates that, but the point is it’s the oppressor’s responsibility.   
  
I use the term "oppressor" because there are signs in the script that Crawford was thinking in broader terms than racism. Lokai's claim that his 'use' of the shuttle was not theft, for instance, is based on Marxist logic (my need gave me the right to it) and a lot of his rants sound Marxist, especially his complaint about him and his 'brothers' being rounded up and sent to fight a war on another planet. The Marxist critique of war is that it pits working-class men against each other for the benefit of the rich, whereas the working-class men of both armies should really be uniting to overthrow the class that sent them to war. The fact that the racial difference between Lokai and Bele is invisible strengthens the impression that class is at least as much at stake in this conflict as race is; and indeed that would be appropriate for 1968. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968 while in the process of planning a Poor People's March on Washington which would have shifted the focus from race to class. Robert F. Kennedy, whose presidential campaign also highlighted poverty, was assassinated on June 5, 1968. "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was written and filmed in the fall of 1968. No wonder Charon was burning.   
  
This race/class stuff is complicated, and you know what, I don’t blame them for not having been able to sort through it all in 1968. If we are to establish a hierarchy of racefail, I think it’s a lot better to fail because you tried than to fail because you didn’t. Making the effort in fall 1968 must have taken some extra cohones. There is also some dramatic justification for making Lokai more Malcolm X than Martin Luther King; the fact that Lokai is so hard to sympathize with might be seen as a deliberate challenge to the would-be liberal viewer. And the final image of the two of them pursuing each other through a dead and burning world is in some ways not a bad representation of the peculiarly intimate and mutually destructive relationship between the oppressor and his Other--as it was also, probably, evocative for its original viewers of urban American race riots, though the footage used was evidently from WWII England.   
  
I do blame them for how badly made this episode is.   
  
Memory Alpha indicates that the unbelievably long sequence of alternating shots of Bele and Lokai running…running…running…while shots of burning buildings are superimposed upon them was his “creative” solution to the fact that the episode ran short. You can actually see evidence of that problem throughout the episode. Crawford, despite his facility in generating rage-honingly longwinded bombast for Bele and Lokai, doesn’t seem to have been able to flesh out Coon’s story line into an hour-length episode—and this despite the fact that he basically has everything happen twice. Two mysterious strangers beamed aboard, two attempts to take over the Enterprise, etc. Worse, much of the dialogue itself is repetitive, and not in a cool Beckettian way either. Right before the self-destruct sequence, Kirk and Bele go back and forth with “I control this ship!” “No, I do!” until they sound like third-graders. In order to pad the script out to the requisite length, perhaps, pacing is extremely slow, which a) makes the action scenes look ridiculous (the entire bridge crew just lines up behind Bele and stares at the burned-out control panel for what seems like a year) and b) makes the social commentary seem that much more heavy-handed.   
  
For instance: You remember how I’m always saying that all the really interesting stuff about race in Star Trek gets worked out through Spock. Crawford and Taylor point this out in a scene where Lokai is haranguing Chekov and Sulu about Charonian racism. Spock walks by and stands outside the doors eavesdropping. Chekov and Sulu start explaining about how humans are so totally over this racism thing now. Spock listens, then just turns and walks silently back in the other direction.  
  
It’d be a great little moment for honey badger…if only it were a little moment. The fact that it takes about ten times longer than it has to turns a tap on the shoulder into the blow of a sledgehammer.  
  
Taylor also seems to have had a fondness for the Extreme Close Up. During the self-destruct sequence—the most legitimately suspenseful part of the episode—Taylor evidently attempted to increase the suspense by adding in a bunch of shots of just a character’s mouth while he’s delivering the code, or just his eyes. I assume that in film school he learned that this is a good way to increase tension. I find that here, though, it mainly just reminds me that there was a time when not everyone in Hollywood capped their teeth. There is also a really annoying use of the Red Alert window, in which the camera keeps zooming in and zooming back out. Memory Alpha says it’s a _Batman_ reference in honor of Frank Gershon, who played Bele and the Riddler. I say that it’s a bad sign when this is how the director has to entertain himself in order to get through the shoot.  
  
Another bad sign, according to Memory Alpha, is Bele’s invisible spaceship—which is invisible because they didn’t want to spend the money to make a model. There were, apparently, numerous continuity fuck-ups in the original version created by the fact that they were recycling footage from other episodes. Some of these could be cleaned up in the ‘remastered’ version; but nobody could do anything about Bele’s invisible spaceship, because the bridge crew just won’t stop talking about how invisible it is. Its invisibility is remarked upon so often by so many people that by the time Spock mentions its invisibility for the final time, you’re pretty sure that’s not Spock snarking, it’s Nimoy. Robert Justman—again, according to Memory Alpha—bailed after this episode, and you can hardly blame him. When you’re making shit invisible just so you won’t have to shoot it, you’ve basically given up.  
  
Anyway. When I was a youth, I didn’t notice any of the technical problems with this episode; and maybe I was better off then, because I did enjoy this one back in the day. The writing almost drags itself up to standard at the end, as both Bele and Lokai completely fail to assimilate the knowledge that their entire world has been destroyed. There is still something affecting about the way Kirk, the Man of Action, just lets them run, knowing how pointless it is to try to stop the; and the question “Where can he go?” resonates even more, really, as I think about how our own planet is burning. But now, I can see all the signs of approaching doom, and I fear that the rest of Season 3 is going to be pretty depressing.  
  
Up next: “The Mark of Gideon.”


	70. THE MARK OF GIDEON

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the episodes got worse I started mixing up the format of the reviews a little to keep myself entertained. This one is done in the form of a talk show hosted by Ophidia (a self-aware Mary Sue character I invented for my DS9 fanfic back in the 90s; she also has an offstage cameo in "Could Fill A Book") with most of the cast, the writers, the director, and other special guests.

**STARDATE: August 28, 2012**

**THE MARK OF GIDEON**  
 **Written by George F. Slavin and Stanley Adams**  
  
I’m switching up the format a little for this one. It needed a little more je ne sais WTF.  
  
 **The Summary** : The Enterprise is in orbit around the planet Gideon, which is being courted by the United Federation of Planets. Gideon has somehow managed to shield itself from sensor scans and refuses to allow anyone on its soil, so little is known about it; but they have made an exception for “The captain of the Enterprise.” Kirk has Spock beam him down. Kirk rematerializes, not on Gideon, but on the transporter pad. Spock’s not there, though. Nobody’s there. He’s all by himself on the Enterprise, and it’s still orbiting Gideon.   
  
After discovering that his arm is messed up but he can’t remember why, he finds a blonde woman in the hallway wearing a purple bra and panties whose odd upswinging central peak artfully disguises her bellybutton. She has covered her shame slightly with a gauzy red jumpsuit and seems to be performing some sort of interpretive dance. She identifies herself as Odona but claims to remember very little else except for it being really, REALLY crowded where she came from.   
  
While Kirk tries to get Odona to help him figure out what’s going on, Spock is doing his best with Hodin, the head of the Gideon council, who has called in to let him know that Kirk never showed up. Spock wants permission to come down and search; but it’s not forthcoming. Starfleet is no help. Spock does manage to get them to allow him to test the supposedly ‘faulty’ transporter by beaming up a Gideonite; in the process they discover that the coordinates they were originally given for Kirk’s transport don’t match those of the council chamber. Shrewdly supposing that the Gideonites have made off with Kirk, Spock tries one last time to get a search authorized by Starfleet; he is denied. He goes off in search anyway.  
  
Well, by now Kirk has done the deed with Odona and she’s hoping that he’ll be willing to stay with her on the empty Enterprise forever; but then she starts getting sick. Hodin shows up and explains that she has a form of meningitis. Kirk says he’s had it himself. Gideonite says yes, that’s the point; we needed your germs. You see, Gideon used to be a paradise, and things were going so well that the Gideonites developed super-crazy health and recuperative powers to the point where their organs renew themselves spontaneously and there’s no disease and they hardly ever die…and so they have overpopulated the planet to the point where there is no flat surface on which the people of Gideon are not stacked.  
  
While Kirk argues with Hodin about whether Odona (who it turns out is his daughter) really needs to die in order for his scheme to work, Spock has transported down to the fake Enterprise and started sniffing around. He finds Kirk; they transport with Odona to the real Enterprise, where McCoy has her fixed up in a matter of minutes. Kirk seems to like Odona now; but she has to go lead her people, and she now has the precious deadly germs in her blood, so they don’t need Kirk any more. Off she goes. **The End.**  
  
OPHIDIA: Hello, and welcome to _Meta Talk_! Later on I’ll be sharing some of my photos and tweets from the Mary Sue Convention on Coruscant…right now, all I can say is, Gem, if you’re listening, I need my iPod back,  and next time stay off the Hamster Death Gulps cause you are a REALLY mean drunk. But here in the studio with me I have the writers, George F. Slavin and…wait. Aren’t you Cyrano Jones?  
  
STANLEY ADAMS: No, I’m not…but I played him on TV! (Laughs heartily)  
  
OPHIDIA: Curious to know how a veteran TV hack like George here wound up collaborating with the tribble vendor, but at any rate, we also have the director, Jud Taylor…  
  
JUD: Howdy.  
  
OPHIDIA: And the captain of the starship Enterprise, James T. Kirk. Captain, thank you for coming.  
  
KIRK: It’s my pleasure.  
  
OPHIDIA: Isn’t it always. Mr. Slavin, Mr. Taylor, Cyrano—  
  
STANLEY ADAMS: My name is Stanley.  
  
OPHIDIA: Fine…I just want to say that you did some good work here. Interesting premise, many very evocative moments. I particularly remember the faces of the Gideonites looking in through the viewscreen and the viewing port. Sort of a cross between concentration camp victims and fish in a tank. No, I don’t mean that as snarky as it came out. I saw all these episodes long ago and some I don’t remember a single shot; but this one seems to have gotten to me.  
  
JUD: Why thank you, Ms. Varegia.  
  
OPHIDIA: As a premise, the nightmare of overpopulation is more relevant than ever, so I have to congratulate you on this episode’s staying power, George.  
  
STANLEY ADAMS: Hello.  
  
OPHIDIA: And Cyrano. Kirk, this is the third episode so far where you have been alone on the Enterprise in some way, shape or form. There’s your ghost appearances in “Tholian Web,” and then “Wink of an Eye,” and now this. Why do you think this keeps happening to you?  
  
KIRK: I don’t care why it keeps happening. What I want to know is when is it going to stop, and particularly—  
  
GEORGE SLAVIN: You never had it so good. The run of the set and that hot blonde chick and all the time in the world—  
  
KIRK: Oh yeah. A hot blonde alien woman who wants me to have sex with her. Like that’s a reason to get up in the morning. Listen, I have to keep my teeth clenched around here to keep from chewing on stray blondes.  
  
OPHIDIA: You stole that line from Raymond Chandler.  
  
KIRK: So you know he Stood the Test of Time. Anyway, whatshername, Odometer or Anadama or Edamame—  
  
GEORGE SLAVIN: Odona.  
  
KIRK: Odona. Fine. Less personality than Dahlia or Delia or—  
  
OPHIDIA: Deela.  
  
KIRK: --who had less personality than Shahna. It’s like they keep running the model through the cloning machine but it degenerates with every copy.   
  
OPHIDIA: Well, I have to say I did notice a marked lack of interest on your part. I mean you went through the motions, but the chemistry—  
  
KIRK: Here’s my problem. I’m captain of the Enterprise, right?  
  
OPHIDIA: Yes.  
  
KIRK: I know the ship like the back of my hand, right?  
  
OPHIDIA: Sure.  
  
KIRK: In what fucking universe am I such a moron that I can’t tell a dummy Enterprise from the real one?  
  
GEORGE SLAVIN: You were disoriented by the whole transporter thing and your mind became confused.  
  
KIRK: Fuck you!   
  
GEORGE SLAVIN: I beg your pardon.  
  
KIRK: Excuse the profanity. It’s just so…fucking…SATISFYING. Anyway, yeah, fuck you, Slavin. Spock’s on board for two seconds, presses one button, figures out it’s a duplicate. And I can’t do that?  
  
GEORGE: But he knew where he was going—  
  
OPHIDIA: And to be fair, honey badger is smarter than you.  
  
KIRK: Bullshit! I mean, maybe he is smarter than me, but he doesn’t know the ship any better.  
  
OPHIDIA: Well, George, I do have to say, he has a point.   
  
GEORGE: Willing suspension of disbelief?  
  
OPHIDIA: All the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge could not suspend the amount of disbelief this episode requires. On the Rewatch Plausibility Scale, which goes from 0 to 20, your episode scored a negative 1000.  
  
GEORGE: That’s not fair!  
  
OPHIDIA: I took the liberty of preparing a short list of major implausibilities relating just to the Enterprise and its crew. Mr. Spock, thanks for coming, would you please read them?  
  
SPOCK: Number one: after he rematerializes on what he believes is the Enterprise’s transporter pad, the Captain was quite reasonably vexed to discover, as he thought, that I had left my post before confirming transport. Of course, his assessment of the situation was in error. However, since I was evidently not aware that the Captain had not reached his destination until I was contacted by the Gideon council, I must conclude that in fact I was careless enough to leave the transporter room without verifying that the Captain had arrived safely. This, of course, I would never do. Given the high incidence of transporter malfunctions—  
  
KIRK: And what about your passionate love for me?  
  
SPOCK: Number two: As soon as I discovered the duplicate Enterprise I attempted to contact the real Enterprise using my communicator. I was successful. No doubt the idea would ultimately have occurred to the captain as well, given sufficient time.  
  
KIRK: Hey.  
  
SPOCK: And yet, you never once show—  
  
GEORGE: His mind was disoriented, I tell you!  
  
SPOCK: Bitch, please.  
  
KIRK: Precisely, Mr. Spock.  
  
SPOCK: Furthermore, according to Hodin and Odona there is no empty space available on the planet surface. And yet, they have managed to find enough room, and enough resources, to build a working replica of the Enterprise capable of fooling the captain into believing he is on the actual Enterprise.  
  
GEORGE: It’s a meta thing, you ungrateful boors, it’s a joke about the set—  
  
OPHIDIA: Bitch, please.  
  
GEORGE: What, you too now?  
  
OPHIDIA: Listen, Mr. Slavin, I breathe, eat, and shit meta, and let me tell you, this is really low-grade meta. The whole “oh look we put Kirk on a set just like Shatner’s always already on the set illusions within illusions what an awesome mise en abime” thing is cool for about ten seconds and after that it’s just like, what, I’m supposed to care what happens now?  
  
MCCOY: It makes no goddamned sense medically either.  
  
OPHIDIA: Dr. McCoy, glad you could make it.  
  
MCCOY: If all they want is a virus, all they have to do is ask. I could synthesize a hundred gallons of live whatchamacallit meningitis in ten minutes using nothing but a petri dish and a thimbleful of Jim’s blood. What the hell do they need _him_ for? What’s the point of making him play house with that blonde gal?   
  
OPHIDIA: It would make _some_ sense if the virus were sexually transmitted, but as it is—  
  
STANLEY ADAMS: Oh my dear. Imagine even alluding to such a thing in 1968.  
  
GEORGE: It was nothing to do with that! Hodin set him up with Odona so he would fall in love with her and stay on Gideon forever—  
  
MCCOY: They don’t _need_ him forever! They don’t need him for a minute. Christ almighty, there’s easier ways of getting a virus into the bloodstream.  
  
OPHIDIA: Anyway, how many fucking times do you have to send some alien mantrap after Kirk to try to trap him into domesticity? Oh my God, so done with that plot.   
  
GEORGE: But you were just complimenting me on the—  
  
OPHIDIA: The premise. I know. But you just came up with this cool idea and you did not spend five fucking minutes trying to make it believable. That’s an insult to the viewers and that is why I, since I have the opportunity, am insulting you.  
  
JUD: Better you than me, George.  
  
OPHIDIA: By the way, Jud…again, thanks for the enduring memory of those eerie and forlorn faces pressed up against the Enterprise windows. And the emptiness of the set, so lonely, so poignant.  
  
JUD: Thanks.  
  
OPHIDIA: Can you tell me why the fuck you shot the climactic argument between Kirk and Hodin from underneath a glass conference table?  
  
JUD: It was…to symbolize…the inversion of…  
  
OPHIDIA: You saw someone do this once in a movie, didn’t you?  
  
JUD: No! I totally have an ironclad rationale for every directorial decision I make!  
  
KIRK: Bitch, please.  
  
JUD: Well I gotta do _something_ to relieve the boredom!  
  
SPOCK: Mr. Senensky was never bored.  
  
OPHIDIA: We’ll take a short break for commercial and we’ll be right back.  
  
* * * *  
  
OPHIDIA: Welcome back! I’m joined in the studio by my good friend Thomas Malthus, author of _An Essay on the Principle of Population_ and other masterpieces. Tom, thanks for coming.  
  
MALTHUS: Glad to be here.  
  
SPOCK: Earth records show that you passed away—  
  
OPHIDIA: It’s the metaverse, Mr. Spock, let go of your parochial notions of linear time. Tom, tell me, Gideon’s predicament—is it plausible?  
  
MALTHUS: I think I may fairly make two postulata. First, that food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.  
  
OPHIDIA: OK, I’ll give you that. Don’t start with the geometrical vs. arithmetical stuff, though.  
  
MALTHUS: The inescapable conclusion is that no such situation as Gideon’s could ever evolve, no matter how irresponsibly the inhabitants copulated or how robust their offspring were. After a certain point it would become impossible for the planet to grow enough food to sustain the population. Famine would operate as a check on the surplus population, and balance would ultimately be restored.  
  
OPHIDIA: By which you mean there would be a famine and the poor would starve by the millions while the rich hoarded the last available resources.  
  
MALTHUS: Your language is rather emotionally charged.  
  
SPOCK: I agree. Nevertheless, in its essentials, her assessment is identical with yours, and both are correct. Indeed one cannot imagine why the situation has not already been corrected, given that there would appear to be no place on the planet surface where food could be grown.  
  
GEORGE: Hydroponics.  
  
MALTHUS: Bitch, please.  
  
SPOCK: No amount of hydroponic gardening could possibly feed such an enormous population.   
  
MALTHUS: The only good that can be said of your narrative, Mr. Slavin, is that it illustrates the final conclusion of all of my research, which is that human society can never be perfected. Gideon’s elimination of disease and unnatural death, a result much sought after by misguided idealists like William Godwin, leads to a forcing of the population and misery is the inevitable result.  
  
KIRK: Look, I agree with you that passion between the sexes is necessary, though I could tell you a thing or two about passion between—  
  
SPOCK: Captain.  
  
KIRK: But as I was explaining to Hodin, you _can_ check the population at the _other_ end.  
  
OPHIDIA: Yes, let’s take a look at that conversation, shall we?  
  
 **HODIN: The birth rate continued to rise, and the population grew, until now Gideon is encased in a living mass...who can find no rest, no peace, no joy.**  
KIRK: Then why haven't you introduced any of the new techniques to sterilize men and women ?  
HODIN: Every organ renews itself. It would be impossible.  
KIRK: Then let your people learn about the devices to prevent conception. The Federation will provide anything you need.  
HODIN: But you see, the people of Gideon have always believed that life is sacred, that the love of life... is the greatest gift. That is the one unshakable truth of Gideon. And this overwhelming love of life has developed our regenerative capacity...and our great longevity.  
KIRK: And the great misery which you now face.  
HODIN: That is bitterly true, Captain. Nevertheless, we cannot deny the truth which shaped our evolution. We are incapable of destroying or interfering with the creation of that which we love so deeply-- life...in every form, from fetus to developed being. It is against our tradition, against our very nature. We simply could not do it.  
KIRK: Yet you can kill a young girl!  
HODIN: We're trying to readjust the life cycle of an entire civilization.  
  
OPHIDIA: All right, so, it’s not like a critique of the pro-life stance on contraception ever comes amiss. But I mean…I mean this is the fucking Ford Foundation, right? This is the U.S. telling the third world, hey, fuck your religious beliefs, you’re surplus because you’re poor and you’re not white and you need to stop breeding so we can go on eating beef for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So here’s some money, why don’t you go to desperately poor towns in India and offer cash incentives for people to get sterilized. Because that’s not coercive. And—  
  
MALTHUS: A population that is not responsible enough to regulate conception must accept the resultant decline in the standard of living.  
  
OPHIDIA: Fuck responsible! Reproductive freedom means freedom to reproduce AND freedom not to, and how you, George Slavin, have the gall to sit Kirk down at that table and you, Jud Taylor, have the nerve to shoot him from below so he looks like a giant, while he tells Gideon they have to get with the sterilization program because the alternatives are unacceptable to him—  
  
SLAVIN: It’s a cautionary tale! It’s a warning about how galloping prosperity can ruin a planet! You’re missing the point—  
  
OPHIDIA: Excuse me. I am not missing the point. We just lived through the hottest fucking summer on record. Ice is melting at the poles faster than Kirk can make it with a spacebabe.   
  
KIRK: Hey!  
  
OPHIDIA: I get the point, all right? I live the point. My daughter and the rest of her generation are going to be impaled on the fucking point. But getting non-Americans to tighten their Malthusian belts is not the solution. And nobody believes it is, either, because if it weren’t for all those surplus people who could we get to make our plastic crap for $0.50 a day? And God knows we need to be making plastic crap! WHAT in the world would HAPPEN if we stopped turning the planet into this _stuff_ that has to be made and shipped and sold and bought or else people can’t live because capitalism says you cannot have a single fucking spot to stand on or a stinking vegetable to eat unless you can pay for it with money you have to earn at some kind of job which on some level has to be paid for by the circulation of all this useless fucking STUFF!  
  
GEORGE SLAVIN: I can’t work with this.  
  
OPHIDIA: Tom is right—this is THE most anti-utopian episode Star Trek ever made and that is why, despite its memorable images and spookiness and the decent scenes for honey badger to show his badassery when faced with diplomats and bureaucrats, I have taken the time to eviscerate it. Good night, everybody!  
  
Up next: “That Which Survives.”


	71. THAT WHICH SURVIVES

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All right, so, when Gene L. Coon invented this "Lee Cronin" character after quitting the show, you knew that was a bad sign. When D. C. Fontana has to invent a bogus pseudonym so that she can distance herself from scripts that were once hers but have been reworked by hacks to the point where they are unrecognizable--and she's STILL working for the show--that's worse.

**STARDATE: August 30, 2012**

**THAT WHICH SURVIVES**  
 **Teleplay by John Meredyth Lucas, story by “Michael Richards” (D. C. Fontana)**  
  
We now return you to our regular format.  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise is checking out a planet so weird that, as Kirk says, even Spock can’t explain it. He, Sulu, McCoy, and a geologist named Lieutenant D’Amato (nice knowing you, geologist guy) beam on down. Just before they dematerialize they see a woman in a purple bra and bell-bottoms gesturing at them and saying, “Wait! You must not go!” before grabbing the redshirt at the transporter on the shoulder. The redshirt screams in pain.  
  
Well, the landing party materializes on the planet surface, and before they can say, “WTF?” there’s a massive earthquake caused by stagehands under the Styrofoam, excuse me, some kind of power surge which also has the effect of instantaneously flinging the Enterprise a hundred light years in the opposite direction. So now the landing party is stranded, and Spock is in command of an Enterprise which, according to Scotty, “feels wrong,” though he can’t quite explain why. They start heading back to the planet; but that purple-clad female pops up again in Engineering and, after asking some most pointed questions about the matter-antimatter bypass relay, kills another redshirt with a touch on the shoulder.  
Down on the planet, a testy Kirk directs his hardy band to find the means of survival as they wait to be found by the Enterprise, which they hope hasn’t blown up or crashed into the planet. All they can find is some grass, and even that is crawling with some kind of parasite. While off geologizing somewhere, D’Amato encounters the purple temptress again. She seems most insistent on touching him and even says she is “for him;” as always, she seems to know all about him. Well, by the time Kirk and the others get to D’Amato, he’s dead; like the two Enterprise casualties, he’s had “every cell in his body disrupted.” (McCoy, of course, is not there to autopsy the two Enterprise redshirts; but his locum tenens Dr. Mbenga is filling in. And here I said that we would never see Dr. Mbenga again after “A Private Little War.” O me of little faith!)  
  
While Spock tries to figure out WTF is happening on the Enterprise, Kirk et al. bury D’Amato—or rather try; the planet has very thin topsoil over super-hard rock that phasers can’t cut through—and Sulu volunteers to take the first watch. The purple predator appears again, saying she is “for” Sulu. Sulu manages to hold her off long enough to alert the others, but when Kirk and McCoy arrive he’s been touched on the shoulder and is in serious pain. Kirk and McCoy try to keep her off him; in the process, Kirk gets touched, but nothing happens to him. This emboldens him to interrogate the purple people-disruptor while playing a game of keep-away in which he and McCoy block her access to the fallen Sulu. She gives it up that her name is Losira and that she believes killing is wrong, but that she has to touch Sulu so she can be at one with him. Finally she gives up and disappears. Sulu will recover, though he wonders aloud how “such evil” can exist, and be so beautiful at the same time.  
  
Well, as usual, it appears that on the Enterprise all hell started breaking loose as soon as Spock’s Vulcan posterior touched the cushions of the captain’s chair. Losira, or some version of her, fused the bypass thingy and the ship is now going to accelerate until it blows up. Scotty thinks no power on earth can stop it. Spock opines that maybe he can go in through some special dangerous magnetic conduit and shut the power off there using a modified cattle prod. Scotty says, “You’ll be killed, man!” Spock points out that they’ll all die in the explosion if someone doesn’t do this. Scotty volunteers instead, and off he goes to crawl through the tube. So much suspense, so much tension, so much counting down—and then at the last minute Spock tells him to reverse the polarity on his cattle prod and the thing gets stuck but hooray! At the last possible moment, it works! It turns out the Enterprise got to its new location by being transported and “reassembled slightly out of phase,” so Scotty was right about it feeling wrong, and that’s why they had to dramatically reverse polarity at the last moment.  
  
Kirk, McCoy, and Sulu, meanwhile, have had another run-in with Her Purpleness, during which Kirk has a chance to do his _bullshitsu_ moves on her and she becomes confused. They eventually get into the cave from whence Losira came, which contains a computer which looks like the M5 cubed, which I guess would make it the M125. Losira shows up and says she’s “for” Kirk. McCoy and Sulu run interference; but two more Losiras show up, each claiming to be “for” one of the others. A high-stakes game of three-card monte is interrupted by the arrival of Spock and a redshirt, who shoots out the computer. All the Losiras disappear. What shows up instead is a projected image of Losira’s recorded message, intended to be played for the Galandrians when they finally arrived at the “outpost.” Losira mentions that they have unfortunately created a deadly parasite which is in the process of wiping out the entire advance force, including her. She left the computer in charge of defending against invaders; the computer decided to do this by creating material replicas of Losira. In response to Spock’s comment that beauty is transitory, Kirk disagrees, looking at Losira’s image and saying “Beauty survives.” The End.  
  
In my life I have written two poems involving _Star Trek_. The first was named after this episode, and alas, it has not survived; it dropped into the black hole opened up by the migrations of many hard drives. I can now only remember a few lines:  
  
 **looking straight at**  
Lee Meriweather  
(Miss America 1955)  
resplendent in a pair of polyester hip-hugging bell-bottoms  
he said _no, Mr. Spock,  
beauty survives_  
  
  
It was written about someone I had known on the internet for a long time after meeting her in person for the first time. Back in the day, when images were not so plentiful on the Interwebs, it was common for people to form friendships without either party having any idea of what the other looked like. The experience of meeting such a friend in person for the first time was unique and it saddens me to know that Facebook has killed it. Somehow the ending of “That Which Survives” suggested itself to me as an objective correlative for the mix of emotions that seeing her in person evoked. The title is ironic—the fashions that made Losira’s costume seem like a good idea to William Ware Theiss have not in fact survived, nor has the aesthetic of beauty that went with them; and of course the glory of being Miss America is as ephemeral as anything could be. At the same time, there was something about this episode—about Star Trek as a show—that did survive. Like Losira’s, the images of the actors have outlasted their mortal models; DeForest Kelley and James Doohan, alas, are no longer with us, and the Shatner, Nimoy, Meriweather, Nichols, and Takei of 2012 are not those of 1968.    
  
Downer opening! And yet not, because my point is that with all the shortcomings I’m about to inventory, “That Which Survives”—and, I would say at this point, Star Trek generally—appears to have given me an early way of working through my fear of mortality. As Kirk says, despite the computer’s attempt to turn her into a demonic and deadly version of herself, the original Losira’s personality was so powerful that the replicas felt guilt and remorse over the killing that the computer programmed them to do. The quiet dignity with which the taped Losira describes her predicament and tearlessly predicts her own demise—being sorry, not for her own death, but for the fact that there will be nobody on the planet to greet the new arrivals—was a model, I guess, for the stoicism I saw in the subject of that poem, and also for the stoicism I perhaps foresaw I would need as I got older.   
  
I complain about this show a lot. But there are these little priceless things, the diamonds sitting in the middle of this huge and ugly mass of coal, that have been so valuable to me all these years. They aren’t as entertaining to talk about as the bad stuff, but as I approach the death of the original show itself (though boy howdy, would it survive) I want to acknowledge them.   
  
All right. So. Taking ‘his’ place in the Hall of Star Trek Mystery right next to “Lee Cronin” is “Michael Richards.” I wonder about this shadowy figure. We are surely past the point where people felt that Dorothy Catherine needed a male-seeming handle to avoid scaring the viewers away. Since “Michael Richards’s” other Star Trek credit is “The Way To Eden,” I can only assume that she ardently wished to distance herself from the final product because other people messed with it too much. The prime suspect there would seem to be John Meredyth Lucas, who we last heard from as the author of “Elaan of Troyius,” and who also wrote “Patterns of Force,” and is credited with the teleplay.  
  
As an episode, this is an improvement over, say, “The Mark of Gideon” and “The Empath” in that it has a more or less coherent and plausible (for Star Trek) plot which is decently constructed. There is more real suspense in the saving-the-Enterprise plot line than there was in the self-destruct countdown in “Let That Be” or in many of the other Peril Provision plots. With Kirk, McCoy, and Sulu out of the picture and Chekov mysteriously absent (his place is filled by a “Lieutenant Radha” who I believe is supposed to be Hindu given her name and her apparent bindi; at any rate, Dorothy Catherine managed to get us our first female navigator), Scotty and Uhura get more time. This is definitely one of Scotty’s best episodes; his scenes in the crawl space are excellent and his volatility plays well against the much calmer Spock. When, after saving the Enterprise by imperiling himself, Scotty gets Spock’s paltry acknowledgment—“Mr. Scott, you have accomplished your task”—he bitches at first that Spock could at least say “thank you,” but when Spock starts replying, Scotty just lies there in the tube and starts laughing with relief and a kind of affection, and it’s a great moment. Simliarly, when Uhura asks Spock what the chances are of Kirk et al. being still alive, and Spock starts going off about how they’re not gambling, they’re just doing the most logical thing they can by returning to the planet, she gives him a “Yes, Mr. Spock” with a little smile that says, “It’s kind of cute how you keep pretending you have no emotions, and I don’t mind helping you do it.”   
  
It’s also highly gratifying to see Sulu actually doing something, though he does get some pretty crappy lines. But he shows pluck and resourcefulness and all that, despite being sniped at by Kirk every time he offers an analysis of the situation. And this brings me to the negatives:  
  
I don’t know what Shatner and Nimoy did to piss Lucas (and perhaps Fontana) off, but both Kirk and Spock act like dicks in this episode. Kirk shuts down Sulu’s first attempt to be helpful by comparing the earthquake to the impact of a meteor that hit Siberia back in the day: “Mr. Sulu, if I’d wanted a Russian history lesson I’d have brought along Mr. Chekov.” (Yeah…where IS that guy, anyway?) Kirk does eventually ease up on him, but it’s hard to see why he’s so pissed off, and Sulu doesn’t seem to quite know how to respond to it.   
  
Spock, meanwhile, is a parody of himself. There’s no other way to put it. He is forced to make himself the butt of jokes about his Vulcanness nearly every time he opens his mouth. Instead of the snarky Spock who knows what the humans want from him but just isn’t interested in providing it, we have a naïve and terminally square Spock who never gets a joke or recognizes a figure of speech (when Uhura, hoping for an explanation of the disturbance, asks him “What happened?” he says, “It appears that my occipital lobe came into contact with that armrest”) and utterly tone-deaf to the people around him. When Scotty, asked for warp factor 8, promises to “sit on the warp engines and nurse them if I have to,” Spock stops him with an admonishing finger and says,  “That position would be not only unhelpful, but also undignified.” I understand the goal is to heighten the tension by keeping the sparks snapping between the unflappable Spock and the totally flappable Scotty during the final throes; and it’s nice that Spock is given the chance to actually value and interpret Scotty’s complaint about the ship’s “feel,” which is the only thing that saves them all from being blown to kingdom come. But this episode is definitely laughing at Spock instead of with him, and that makes all the interpersonal stuff on the Enterprise so much weaker. Doohan and Nichols rescue some of it by conveying the affection that their characters have built up for their prickly but beloved first officer; but otherwise, faugh. I might blame Fontana for this—thinking back on “Friday’s Child” and the weak comedy elements of “City on the Edge”—but it also reminds me of Spock’s characterization in “Patterns of Force,” especially the “Why should I wish to aim at such a structure?” moment.  
  
What we can absolutely trace back to Lucas is the gender politics. Though not as overtly misogynistic as “Elaan of Troiyus”—really, he’s got nowhere to go from that one but up—Losira’s part of the plot is structured around the same conception of women as beautiful but destructive. As in “Elaan,” physical contact with one of these desirable creatures can only lead to annihilation. The fact that each Losira is matched with an individual male emphasizes all the ways in which this setup is being used as an allegory for heterosexual relationships; she says she’s your soulmate, but if you let her fuse you with you she will “disrupt” every cell in your body, not only killing you but making you Other. Makes me kind of want to find a pair of Groucho Marx glasses and a cigar and say, “I’ve heard of the disruptive power of femininity, but THIS is ridiculous!”   
  
This of course makes one want to go to town on the sheer implausibility of a computer powerful enough to do all the shit it does having to rely on getting one humanoid into physical contact with another in order to defend itself. But I did the whole implausibility thing last time.   
  
As a youth, I think I had a thing for Lee Meriweather. I deduce this from my response to the episode and from the fact that I used to watch _Barnaby Jones_ , in which she played Barnaby’s daughter-in-law Betty, faithfully after school. (My parents tried to limit my TV viewing; but I seem to have viewed quite a bit.) She managed to parlay a year as Miss America into a thriving if never exactly A-list television career. Good for you, Lee. I would just note in passing that as always, attempts to censor sexuality merely emphasize it: the harder they work to cover these women’s bellybuttons the more attention they draw to them, to the point where if you _didn’t_ think the bellybutton was an erogenous zone, you’d begin to start. What was it about the humble bellybutton? Was it that it was evidence that we were once born, that all of us began tethered to the wombs of our mothers, that we are mammals, that pregnancy is a fact of human existence and therefore so is sex? Or what?  
  
Up next: “The Lights of Zetar.” No conscious memory of this one, but it involves a library, so we’ll see what gets dredged up.


	72. THE LIGHTS OF ZETAR

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scotty in love.

**STARDATE: September 10, 2012**

**THE LIGHTS OF ZETAR**  
 **Written by Jeremy Tarcher and Shari Lewis**  
  
I do not totally hate this episode. That’s a pleasant surprise.   
  
It’s not great. But it is interesting.  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise is on its way to Memory Alpha, a planetoid which hosts a giant archive for all the planets in the Federation. Hot Lieutenant Z Series, excuse me, Lieutenant Mira Romaine, is on her way there to install new equipment and, apparently, stay on as their IT person. She has been working with Scotty, who is totally besotted with her. Kirk, during a kind of cool overhead zooming-in shot which looks to me like it might have been recycled from a previous episode, muses to his captain’s log about what it’s like when a guy Scotty’s age falls in love, while Sulu and Chekov exchange snark. Well, this idyll is cut short when a strange mass of multicolored sparkly energy appears in their path. They try to avoid it, but its energy invades the ship, incapacitating everyone on the bridge in a slightly different way. Its sparkly alien lights start twinkling inside the EXTREME CLOSE UP of Mira’s eyeball. After the thing apparently departs, Mira collapses. She has a strange glassy look on her face and her mouth is hanging open and sounds are coming out of it that Pink Floyd would have approved. Then McCoy zots her with something and she comes around.   
  
Kirk orders her to sickbay; she’s “uncooperative” when asked to describe her experiences. After getting lectured by all the guys, she gets googled over by Scotty, who assures her that everyone gets a little woozy on their first deep space trip. Mira is a little perturbed, perhaps because she keeps having these visions of dead bodies. Meanwhile, the ‘storm’—they all know it’s not a storm, but that’s what they’re calling it—attacks Memory Alpha before the Enterprise can warn them. Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and McCoy beam on over; it’s a disaster area. The computer “brain” is burned out and Scotty finds a pile of dead academics in the reading room. There’s one poor woman who’s just barely alive; her face is turning all kinds of psychedelic glowing colors and that same distorted bass-register cheez whiz is coming out of her gaping mouth. And then she dies.  
  
Kirk decides to bring Mira on over. Mira materializes, sees that the dead academics exactly match the vision that she recently had, and freaks. She also has a presentiment that the ‘storm’ is coming back. Kirk assures her that the ‘storm’ was headed away last they checked; but Sulu calls in to them, and sure enough, the thing is on its way back. They all beam back, but Mira somehow gets hung up in transit. Scotty steps in and manages to rematerialize her. But Mira’s feeling weirder than ever, and when she tells Scotty that she’s having visions he convinces her that it’s space sickness. Meanwhile the ‘storm,’ which Spock has determined is actually a collection of at least ten distinct life forms, is hot on their tail. After trying evasive maneuvers and a warning shot, Kirk blasts the Enterprise’s phasers right through the ‘storm.’ Mira screams. Scotty calls up to tell them that shooting the ‘storm’ is killing Mira.  
  
OK, so, Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and Mira meet up down in the briefing room for a formal hearing into WTF is going on with Mira. McCoy reports that Mira’s brainwaves changed after their first encounter with the creature. Spock notices that Mira’s new brainwaves exactly match the energy readings he got from the giant sparkly cloud. They determine that Mira, because of the exceptional “pliancy” of her brain structure, has been essentially taken over by this creature. Mira reports her visions, including one she’s had of Scotty dying, and says she would rather die than hurt Scotty. Kirk says they think they have a plan for dealing with the creature and that next time they try to overtake her she shouldn’t resist and that way they can control them through her. She says sure, anything I can do.  
  
Well, the creature comes back at them. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty trundle Mira down to the antigrav pressure chamber. The sparkly lights swarm round Mira as they are about to put her in, entering her body and possessing her. With an electronically manipulated voice and glassy stare, Mira informs them that the sparkly lights are the immaterial desires/hopes/dreams/wills/souls of the last hundred inhabitants of Zetar, a planet where all life went extinct long ago. They have been roaming the galaxy looking for a body they can live through again, and at last they’ve found one. Kirk argues with them, but they refuse to give up Mira’s body. Mira fights to retain her own identity long enough to get into the pressure chamber; but in the end Scotty has to bundle her in at some risk to himself. But he doesn’t die; and they close her up in the chamber and turn up the pressure until the sparkly lights are squeezed out of her into the chamber, where they flicker out and disappear. McCoy brings down the pressure gradually while Scotty sits by the viewing window smiling and waving at her as she floats there.   
  
Final banter time! This time it’s down in sickbay. McCoy reports that Mira has pulled through. He and Spock comment on her unusual strong-willedness. Kirk wonders if her love for Scotty helped. Spock is willing to consider the possibility. McCoy is convinced. Both agree Mira is ready to return to duty. Kirk calls Scotty, who concurs. Kirk notes that the fact that Bones, Spock, and Scotty all agree on something is an “Enterprise first.” And on they go to Memory Alpha, where Mira will have “a lot of work to do.” **The End.**  
  
This episode was written by—of all people—Shari Lewis, creator of Lambchop’s Play-Along, and her husband. According to IMDB, Lewis also wanted to play Mira Romaine, but was not cast. So this is like a Mary Sue to the second power. Nevertheless, in spite of all the crap I’m going to get to in a minute, “The Lights of Zetar” is more than just a giant bucket of suck. Which, for this part of Season 3, is high praise.     
  
As you might imagine, I have had some time lately to think about the perennial “Star Trek was sexist” “No it wasn’t” “OMG how can you say you’re not seeing that the miniskirts alone” “La la la la you’re a girl so I can’t hear you” debate familiar to all of us from TOS fandom. And I have this to say: Sure, the short answer is that yes, it was sexist. Overt and indefensible sexism is not hard to find. “The Lights of Zetar” includes this classic example:  
  
 **CHEKOV: I never thought Mr. Scott would go for the brainy type.  
SULU: I don’t think he’s noticed that she even has a brain.**  
  
Hey, fuck you, Sulu. Not only is your statement sexist and offensive, but it is factually wrong. Let’s back the tape up to Scotty’s first scene with Mira:  
  
 **SCOTTY: You’re the sanest, smartest, kindest woman who’s ever come aboard this ship.**  
MIRA: Anything else?  
SCOTTY: Anything else I’ll keep to myself for the moment.  
  
See? He DOES know she has a brain!  
  
This second exchange indicates that there is also a longer answer. Sexism is in fact endemic to the TOS universe. The same stereotypes about women keep showing up—they’re irrational, they’re stupid, they’re unfit for the really desirable/difficult jobs, they’re weaker and more vulnerable, they’re susceptible to outside influence, they provoke male desire which they then cruelly refuse to satisfy, and so on. But there is a lot of variation in how those stereotypes are used. It’s been particularly interesting to track the episodes written partially or wholly by women and compare them against the ones written by men.   
  
What you might call the “man-trap” plot, for instance, in which a female alien tries to trap a man or men into domestic and/or sexual captivity, appears to be an exclusively male thing. “The Cage,” “The Menagerie,” “Metamorphosis,” “A Private Little War,” “Spock’s Brain,” “Wink of an Eye,” “Elaan of Troiyus,” and “The Mark of Gideon” are all written by men. (The male-authored “For the World is Hollow…” is slightly different in that Natira herself doesn’t trick McCoy and McCoy clearly makes his own decision to stay; but since McCoy can’t mate with Natira until he has a fucking Instrument Of Obedience implanted in his HEAD,  the same conflation of seduction with captivity obtains. We might also add “The Man-Trap” and “That Which Survives,” in which seduction is conflated with death.)   
  
In “This Side of Paradise,” “The Enterprise Incident,” and “The Paradise Syndrome”--all written by women—romances do threaten to break up the Enterprise Dream Team; but in both “Paradise” episodes the man involved is ‘trapped’ by something else (happy spores in “This Side,” amnesia in “Syndrome”) and the woman is sincerely in love with him. When Captain Hotforvulcans seduces Spock in “The Enterprise Incident” she does it overtly and frankly, and has no interest in confining him to her private domestic/sexual dungeon; in fact, she explicitly promises him _more_ freedom and more room for his ambition than Starfleet has given him. The male principals, of course, are required to exit the relationship and return to duty; but whereas in many of the male-authored episodes this is presented as a lucky escape, in the episodes written by women the return to duty is represented as a loss—just as it is in “City on the Edge,” which was originally written by a man but substantially revised by a woman. (“Metamorphosis,” in which the alien captor’s genuine love for its victim eventually redeems it, hovers interestingly between these two versions of the romance plot.)   
  
A similar gender breakdown is visible in the treatment of Hot Lieutenants and other guest-starring female characters who work either for or with Starfleet. (I’m excluding the Hot Yeomen, who are essentially just filling in the role that Yeoman Rand played before Grace Lee Whitney was fired.) Is Mira Romaine, in fact, the sanest/smartest/kindest of the Hot Lieutenants? Well, let’s look at her competition:  
  
MALE-AUTHORED:  Dr. Dehner (“Where No Man has Gone Before”), Dr. Helen Noel (“Dagger of the Mind”), Lieutenant McGivers (“Space Seed”), Lieutenant Carolyn Palamas (“Who Mourns for Adonais?”), Federation Commissioner Nancy Hetford (“Metamorphosis”), Lieutenant Mulhall (“Return to Tomorrow”)  
  
FEMALE-AUTHORED: Dr. Miranda Jones, “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”  
  
OK. So. You look at the Hot Lieutenants written by the men, and an interesting constellation of fail emerges. Three of the six (Noel, McGivers, Palamas) are professionally incompetent. Dehner is a slightly better psychologist than Noel, but she gets lumped in with McGivers and Palamas in the (Almost) Betrays The Ship Cause She’s Hot For The Bad Boy category. Hetford and Dehner are also portrayed as frigid careerist bitches who have to be softened up via alien intervention and then sacrificed for the good of others (Dehner dies taking down Gary Mitchell; Hetford gives up her own identity—or has it taken from her—so she can experience love, something she was not able to do before merging with the Companion). The only woman who escapes from this vortex is Lieutenant Mulhall—and who knows, maybe Kingsbridge (John T. Dugan’s) wife (Judy Burns, who co-wrote “The Tholian Web” with him) was an unacknowledged collaborator.   
  
On the woman-authored side, well, it’s a small sample. But though Miranda Jones is tagged with several of these stereotypes by the men around her, the episode forces them to respect her. In other words, the characters are sexist, but the episode forces them to see the error of their ways and acknowledge how awesome Miranda is.   
  
Something similar is going on with Mira Romaine’s character in “Zetar.” Initially, she’s treated like a child by Scotty and like a pain in the ass by everyone else. Kirk is openly annoyed by the fact that he no longer has Scotty’s full attention; Sulu passes remarks about the irrelevance of Mira’s brain; McCoy is highly annoyed by her refusal to tell him the whole story about her experience of the Zetarians’ first attack and even more pissed off when she resists the tests he wants to run. Her recalcitrance prompts McCoy to deliver a lecture about how “any career she hopes for in Starfleet will require discipline and cooperation.” But the snap judgments the guys make about Mira turn out to be wrong. Scotty _has_ noticed her brain; it’s apparently one of his favorite things. (And anyway. Why would Scotty _not_ go for the brainy type? What the hell were he and Lt. Palamas or that belly dancer on Argelius ever going to have to talk about?) And in the final banter scene, Spock notes that Mira “handled herself well” in the end and that she should have a promising career in Starfleet.   
  
How we get to the vindication, though, is a lot more complicated here than it was in “Is There In Truth…”. The entire plot, if you are so inclined, can be seen as an allegory about the difficulty of maintaining your identity as a woman working in a hierarchical, patriarchal, male-dominated profession. Unlike Miranda Jones, Mira is young and inexperienced. McCoy notes that her brain shows unusual “pliancy in new learning situations.” This “pliancy,” which of course is exactly what an organization like Starfleet wants in its junior officers, is both a blessing and a curse: it makes Mira very, very important to the men around her, but it also exposes her to manipulation by a hostile alien force bent on destroying her identity and using her body for its own purposes.   
  
The Zetarians’ outright bid for total control of Mira’s body is the evil doppelganger of the softer forms of control exercised by the boys on the Enterprise. Scotty, of course, has his own designs on her body. But Kirk, McCoy, and Spock are all also interested in vanquishing Mira’s resistance and securing her cooperation. Over the course of the episode Mira goes from bad patient—you know, the one who argues with the doctor instead of doing everything he says—to good soldier. At the hearing, she apologizes for her previous resistance, and when Kirk hints that the experience of being grilled at these hearings can be “confusing”—presumably because it makes the witness feel like she’s being attacked--Mira promises, “I trust all of you implicitly.” By the time Kirk has explained how the plan to save the ship depends on her willingly allowing the Zetarians to enter her body, her will is totally subordinated to theirs: “Tell me what to do.”  
  
In other words, both the Zetarians and Mira’s male colleagues are using her, and both demand her obedience; the major difference between the Zetarians and the men she works with is that the men are not also demanding her annihilation. Kirk’s defense of Mira’s right to an individual soul and an autonomous human existence provides cover for the demands that they themselves make on her psyche—and on her body as well, since their solution to the problem involves—literally—putting enormous pressure on her.  
  
Oh. Yeah. The solution. WTF? What in the world ever gave any of these guys the idea that pressure would either expel or destroy the Zetarians? I suppose that they don’t have any pressure in their normal environment (viz., deep space), but how is that supposed to work on them once they have merged with Mira’s physical form? Are they just analogizing from toothpaste and assuming that if they squeeze Mira’s body hard enough they will ooze out of her? Or did Lewis and Tarcher just want a chance to put their Mary Sue into Snow White’s glass coffin, which is exactly what that pressure chamber looks like from the side, and next to which Scotty sits and pines away?  
  
The episode points all this stuff out, but doesn’t really critique it. It seems ambivalent about the advisability of a young woman conforming to the expectations of the older men around her. On the one hand, Mira is given many opportunities to declare her will to live and her will to retain her individual identity, and Kirk is heard to tell the Zetarians that Mira’s body is her own and she controls it. On the other, while Spock gives credit to Mira for pulling herself (and the rest of the Enterprise) through the ordeal, Kirk and McCoy insist on giving half of it to Scotty and his “steadfast love” for her. Trauma keeps throwing Mira into Scotty’s arms until she finally reciprocates this steadfast love—which, though I am sorry to say it, manifests for most of the episode as kind of creepy and sad. Say what you will about Shatner, it is evidently not easy to sell those spacebabe romances—or at least so I assume from the fact that both Kelley and Doohan seem desperately uncomfortable in theirs. Scotty is, sadly, at his most convincing when he’s patronizing Mira as if she were his daughter; physically, he’s very awkward with her, and his mooning about is overdone. And yet, she winds up reciprocating. Although not for long, because she’s off to Memory Alpha.  
  
And that’s another thing. I thought surely the fact that Memory Alpha was a massive archive was going to play some role in the plot. But it doesn’t. The library thing, as far as I can see, is there for two reasons: 1) running a major archive is the kind of important but combat-free assignment that most 1969 viewers would consider appropriate for a GIRL and 2) Lewis and Tarcher cracked themselves up over the fact that they made their heroine a hot librarian.  
  
Ah well. It’s watchable and has some freaky and interesting moments. Up next: “Requiem for Methuselah.”


	73. REQUIEM FOR METHUSELAH

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which, in the last few minutes of the episode, K/S pretty much becomes canon.
> 
> No, I'm serious. Read the review.

**STARDATE: September 11, 2012**

**REQUIEM FOR METHUSELAH**  
 **Written by Jerome Bixby**  
  
Methuselah lived nine hundred years,  
Methuselah lived nine hundred years,  
But who calls that livin’ when no gal ‘ll give in  
To no man what’s nine hundred years?  
  
(George & Ira Gershwin, “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” _Porgy and Bess_ )  
  
 **The Summary:** An epidemic of Rigellian fever has broken out on the Enterprise. The only antidote to this fever has to be synthesized from a mineral called Ritalin, excuse me, ryetalyn. They have found a planet with enough ryetalyn; but when Kirk, Spock, and McCoy materialize, they encounter a menacing flying robot which someone evidently made by soldering a colander to an upside-down bowl and then shoving a lamp into the base. Its creator, a grizzled man named Flynt who appears to be wearing some kind of modified renaissance garb, appears and is most uncooperative about letting them have his ryetalyn. McCoy’s question about whether he’s ever seen a victim of Rigellian fever evokes from Flynt a first-person description of Europe during the plague which prompts Spock to ask if he’s a “student of history.” Flynt says his robot (M4) will mine the ryetalyn for them, and meanwhile they can all hang out at his enormous bachelor pad.   
  
Well, Flynt’s not just a student of history. His place is crammed full of unknown masterpieces by some of the greatest artists in human history, including several DaVinci paintings. He’s also not a bachelor; he has a “ward” named Rayna who is tall, blonde, built, and very interested in dimensional physics. Rayna’s interested to meet the first men who’ve visited this planet during her lifetime, and Flynt seems to think this is a good idea. Of course, as soon as Kirk lays eyes on Rayna, he falls for her. As McCoy tries to get the antidote synthesized, Kirk and Rayna get closer until M4 finds Kirk planting one on Rayna in the laboratory and tries to zot him. Spock phasers M4 into the ether, but it turns out Flynt has a spare. Flynt’s apparently contradictory attitude toward the visitors is starting to wig everyone out: he seems to want Kirk and Rayna to spend time together but he’s also jealous when they do, and he puts his robot and lab at their disposal but the first batch of ryetalyn turns out to be no good. There’s also a mysterious door in the laboratory that Rayna says she’s never been allowed to pass through, and Spock has figured out that a lot of these unknown masterpieces appear to have been recently made.  
  
Though Spock tries to get Kirk’s mind back on the pandemic and off Rayna, who is clearly trouble, Kirk cannot be deterred. He’s determined to get Rayna to come back to the Enterprise with him, and she seems to be pretty interested in him and his lips. After finding out from the Enterprise that there’s no records of either Flynt or Rayna anywhere in the galaxy, they discover that the second batch of ryetalyn is nowhere to be found. Spock determines that it’s on the other side of the Forbidden Door. They are about to bust it down when it opens of its own accord. Spock tries to dissuade Kirk from going in there; but they all three go through, and discover a lot of bodies under sheets with tags on them that say things like “Rayna 16.”  
  
Yes, Rayna is an android built by Flynt. Flynt appears, and fesses up to what Spock has long suspected: he is in fact 6000 years old, and the reason he has all these DaVincis and Brahms things in his pad is that he _is_ DaVinci, Brahms, and a bunch of other geniuses. Somehow he discovered back in Mesopotamia that he was immortal, and since then he has been accumulating wealth and knowledge and whatnot. Immortality has its drawbacks, one of them being that the mortal women he’s loved and married all die after what seems to him like a disappointingly short time. So he’s built himself an android that will hold up as well as he does, and now that Kirk has helpfully awakened her sexual desires, Rayna will naturally transfer them to Flynt once Kirk is removed from the vicinity.  
  
Rayna then shows up, and what happens? Naturally, Flynt and Kirk get into a fistfight over who gets to possess her. Rayna, after first bemoaning the fact that she is the cause of all this, finally starts saying, “I choose! It’s my choice!” Kirk is overjoyed, pronounces her human, and begs her to come away with him. Torn between Kirk and Flynt, Rayna suffers a fatal system crash and collapses. Spock explains that she loved both of them in different ways, and could not stand to make a choice that would hurt either, so she solved the problem by dying.  
  
Well, Kirk promises not to tell anyone about Flynt, and Flynt promises to send them on their way with the ryetalyn, and up they go to the Enterprise.  
  
Spock comes to Kirk’s quarters to tell him that the epidemic is now under control. Kirk is despondent over the loss of Rayna and full of remorse. He puts his head down on the desk saying, “I wish I could forget.” McCoy shows up, notes with relief that Kirk is finally sleeping, and reports to Spock that Flynt is dying. Leaving Earth 30 years ago for his hideaway planet somehow removed him from whatever was causing his immortality, and he’s going to age normally and die. He’s decided to dedicate the rest of his life to improving the human condition. After a disquisition on the joys and anguishes of love and what a pity it is that Spock will never know them, McCoy says, “I do wish he could forget her,” and departs. Spock then goes over to Kirk, puts a hand on his head, and says, “Forget.” **The End.**  
  
Whoa nelly.  
  
I have a new theory about the genesis of K/S slash. I believe it was invented by the viewers in order to make Season 3 more interesting. No, wait. It was not invented by the viewers. It is fucking there, I tell you. At least it is in this episode.   
  
“A very old and lonely man, and a young and lonely man,” says the depressed Kirk in that final scene. “We put on a pretty poor show, didn’t we?” Truer words were never spoke. This episode is a real low point for Kirk, on every level. With an epidemic threatening to wipe out his entire crew, he spends the whole episode chasing his mysterious host’s beautiful robot daughter, knowing that Flynt is perfectly capable of fucking up the antidote that his crew desperately needs. Spock suggests that he “pay less attention to the young lady”—and more attention to his fucking SICK AND DYING CREW—but it’s useless; once Rayna’s introduced Kirk is unable to focus on anything else for any length of time. His unusually desperate attachment to her cannot be put down to Rayna’s personality—she is after all an android, and while intelligent and articulate she is appropriately low-affect throughout—and it’s hard to account for it when you consider all the other statuesque blondes he’s loved and left. Perhaps the pain of renunciation is cumulative, and after renouncing Edith Keeler, Shahna, Miramanee, Deela, Elaan, and Odona, Kirk just can’t take it any more. He gets even more pathetic after he finds out she’s an android. Knowing there are a dozen models just like her arrayed on the tables behind him, he still looks at her and says, “I can’t love her…but I do.” He celebrates her discovery of the “freedom of choice” as evidence that she’s human “down to the last blood cell,” but there’s no question as to what he wants her to do with that freedom: CHOOSE ME! CHOOSE ME! When he and Flynt start punching each other out, Spock tries to stop them, pointing out that Kirk’s “primitive instincts” are not helping matters. “Stay out of this,” says Kirk. “We’re fighting over a woman.” Kirk makes her choose between them even though Spock warns him of the danger. All in all the only good thing you can say about Kirk in this episode is that he has the self-awareness to spend the next couple days feeling like shit.  
  
When I encountered Star Trek’s first fembot in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” it didn’t bother me too much because it was not the point of the episode. This time around…the Pygmalion thing, it gets me down. Wow, women would be SO MUCH BETTER if they were designed and built and programmed by men! Everything a man wants and nothing he doesn’t. If you could build such a device, who would bother with the organic article?  
  
There’s extra creepiness because Flynt is both Rayna’s lover and her father. In their early interactions, Flynt and Rayna have a real Prospero and Miranda thing going on. I have heard tell that some readings of _The Tempest_ assume an incestuous relationship between Prospero and his daughter; obviously it can’t have been what Shakespeare intended but it does make some sense of Prospero’s treatment of Ferdinand. As in _The Tempest_ , Flynt secretly wants the romance to develop while appearing to thwart it. As in _The Tempest_ , Rayna and Kirk fall for each other without any help from him; and yet—as in _The Tempest_ \--Flynt has to assert control over the relationship anyway. In fact, as tormented as Flynt seems to be by Rayna’s crush on Kirk, he also seems to like to watch; certainly he spends far longer than necessary watching them make out on his surveillance cameras. Then again, by the time that happens Kirk has been told by Spock that they’re probably being monitored; so maybe Kirk kind of gets off on being watched, or at least on the thought that the old bastard who’s thwarting him is getting an eyeful.    
  
All right, so, poor Rayna is trapped between the older man who has been controlling her existence from the moment of her creation and the younger man who demands that she leave behind everything she’s known and come away with him. That sucks, and it sucks even more that both men are so fricking selfish that each would rather kill her than relinquish her to the other. I’d feel worse about it if she were human. Which, despite the crap Kirk slings about it, I don’t believe she ever is; and if these guys can’t tell the difference, well, that says more about their attitude toward human women than it does about Rayna.  
  
There are other kinds of fail here. For instance, there is a puzzling lack of urgency on the part of all three principals about this galloping fatal epidemic on the Enterprise. All right, so, Kirk and his hormones have gone rogue. Nothing explains McCoy’s lackadaisical attitude. When they finally find the ryetalyn in the secret android lab, Kirk hands it gently to McCoy…who then crosses the room to _put it down_ while they go investigate the replica Raynas. BEAM HIM AND THE MEDICINE THE FUCK UP TO THE ENTERPRISE! THERE ARE PEOPLE FUCKING DYING UP THERE! No, instead McCoy dicks around with the other two until Flynt shows up and turns the Enterprise into a model sitting on his table, giving Kirk a chance to peer into the viewscreen (which is evidently two-way) and see tiny little crewpeople on the tiny little bridge. Come on, Bixby…if you’re gonna steal from other episodes, don’t fucking steal from “Catspaw!”  
  
But. The experience of watching this thing is worth it just for what it does with the Kirk/Spock relationship.  
  
When Spock hears that Flynt is dying he says that “on that day, I shall mourn.” There are a lot of reasons Spock might identify with Flynt, but chief among them is that Spock, like Flynt, has spent the entire episode watching his love object chase someone else—and not only watching, but aiding and abetting. Spock’s the one playing the Brahms waltz while Kirk and Rayna dance; and though Spock is clearly aware of the passage of time and the increase of the danger, he deliberately allows Kirk to dally. He leaves them alone to head to the lab; when McCoy suggests they go tell Kirk about the missing ryetalyn, Spock says, “The Captain instructed us to wait here.” He then tries to protect Kirk’s romance with Rayna by preventing him from finding out that she’s an android: “There may be dangers within,” he says, after offering to go in alone. Spock already knows about Rayna, and doesn’t want Kirk to get his heart broken. Why not? What could possibly motivate Spock to condone and assist in this hideous dereliction of duty—leaving aside the fact that his poor Vulcan heart must be breaking?  
  
One can only assume that he, like Flynt, has reasons of his own for wanting Kirk and Rayna to have their fling. Perhaps Spock is hoping, as Flynt is, that the experience of actually falling in love will “awaken” Kirk’s deeper emotions, and that he can step in and benefit them as Flynt hoped he would. Or perhaps Spock senses that Kirk is driven by some desperate need for female companionship which has reached truly catastrophic levels, and which Spock himself cannot fulfill. Either way, Spock’s silent renunciation of his own feelings during this episode makes McCoy’s final speech to Spock about all the things he will never know because “the word love isn’t written in your book” unforgivably cruel.   
  
She’s lost it, I hear you say. She’s talking about this Kirk/Spock thing like it’s canon. Look, this is what I’m saying: the final scene of this episode MAKES it canon.   
  
Seriously. So Kirk is sitting there in his quarters, all alone, mooning about. Spock comes in on some fairly routine business. Kirk unburdens his remorseful and ashamed soul to him, then either falls asleep or doesn’t. McCoy walks in. He’s not at all surprised to find that Spock is watching over Kirk while he sleeps (or maybe doesn’t). After passing on the news about Flynt, McCoy says, “Well, I can tell Jim later…or you can.” McCoy leaves them together, again not finding it strange at all that Spock wants to hang out in Kirk’s quarters while he’s asleep (or maybe isn’t). And then…and THEN…Spock walks to the slumped-over Kirk and very tenderly touches him as the violins swell. And then he mind-melds Kirk into forgetting all about that Rayna hussy.  
  
DANG!  
  
If Kirk is asleep, well, this is astounding. Spock’s taken it upon himself to rearrange his captain’s memory without his knowledge or consent. Maybe it’s an act of mercy or maybe it’s purely self-interested, but either way…when a guy feels like he can make himself at home inside your skull, you’ve pretty much reached terminal intimacy. Sex is nothing compared to that. Maybe this isn't the first time this has happened. Maybe Spock does this EVERY time Kirk has to break it off with one of his spacebabes. Maybe that's how he maintains their relationship. It would explain a lot.  
  
If Kirk is not asleep it’s even more astounding, since it means that Kirk is letting Spock wipe this painful memory away, thus enabling them to get back to the footing they were on before. If we look at it that way, his initial conversation with Spock takes on extra poignancy; he’s not only beating himself up for having killed Rayna, but apologizing to Spock for having had an affair right in Spock’s face. In that context, “I wish I could forget”—not “forget her,” but just “forget,” presumably, the whole sorry affair—is directed at least as much at Spock as at himself, and is perhaps a plea for exactly the kind of intervention Spock then provides.  
  
I mean sure, we who see slash people, we over read like crazy. But I truly do not know how else you would read this. The fact that this scene even happens, and the stuff that happens in it, literally could not make sense outside of the context of some kind of romantic/sexual relationship between the two of them. Why else is Spock hanging around Kirk's quarters when Kirk's not even conscious? Why else does McCoy accept this without a shrug? What is with this post-heartbreak memory wipe? Nobody else's first officer is doing any of that! I hope!  
  
On edit: AND ANOTHER THING! The Slash Hypothesis is the only thing that can explain the placement of McCoy's little meditation on the triumphs and failures of love.   
  
First of all, since McCoy has recently watched Spock actually explain to both Kirk and Flynt why it was that love destroyed Rayna, he ought to know that what he's saying isn't even accurate. OK, McCoy is clueless. But Spock, in that speech, certainly talks about love as if it's something he's intimately familiar with, and uses an emotionally charged vocabulary (joys, agonies, etc.) which is unusual for him. So McCoy patronizing him about the fact that the word "love" isn't "in your book" makes no sense from a continuity point of view.  
  
Here's how it makes sense: The whole time we watch McCoy deliver this speech, we--since WE after all remember Spock's disquisition on the joys and agonies of love--know that it's ironic, something underlined by the reaction shots of a completely impassive and closed Spock. Spock does know about love, but of course he's not going to admit that to Dr. Bonehead. That speech therefore creates the expectation that once McCoy is gone, Spock will do something to demonstrate that in fact he _does_ know love and its many highs and lows. And what does he do? He walks over to Kirk and touches him. Tenderly. With violins.   
  
Fascinating.   
  
Up next….”The Way to Eden.” Sadface.


	74. THE WAY TO EDEN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once again, D. C. Fontana disavows an episode which would have been really interesting if they had made it the way she originally wrote it. It was supposed to be about a romance between Kirk and McCoy's daughter (McCoy is supposed to be divorced and to have an adult daughter named Joanna). Evidently other people on the Season 3 team found this problematic. So they excised the daughter character, shifted the romance plot to Chekov, and...turned it into Hippies In Space.
> 
> She must have been so pissed. So must DeForest Kelley. The rest of us were mainly bewildered.
> 
> This is actually one of my favorite reviews, even though the episode...well.

**STARDATE: September 14, 2012**

**THE WAY TO EDEN**  
 **Written by Arthur Heinemann and “Michael Richards” (D.C. Fontana)**  
  
I wonder what this episode was like before it sucked.  
  
 **The Summary:** The Enterprise is in pursuit of a shuttlecraft which has been stolen by a “movement” consisting of six people, one of whom is the son of an important ambassador. The shuttle blows up, but the inhabitants are transported on board.  
  
They are space hippies. There is no other way to put that. Several of them are aliens and their musical instruments are futuristic, but apart from that they are constructed entirely out of hippie clichés. One of them is actually carrying a macramé bag. They are all barefoot, and they are led by a man with enormous ears named Dr. Severn. They have decided to ‘drop out’ of technologized life and are in search of a “primitive” planet named Eden where they can all go back to nature. One of them, sadly, is named Adam, and plays the T-square, I’m sorry, some sort of two-stringed guitar. Another, even more sadly, is Chekov’s ex-girlfriend Irina, who dropped out of Starfleet Academy long ago and has sprouted several odd hairy growths on the crown of her head.   
  
Well, the space hippies stage a chanting sit-in in the transporter room. Kirk and Spock head down to talk them into reporting to sickbay for examination. Kirk is mocked, taunted, not listened to, and called “Herbert.” Spock asks to have a shot at communicating with these strange and brightly-plumed creatures. He says he “reaches.” They ask if he’s One. A conversation in this argot ends with the space hippies going off to sickbay.   
  
A disturbance outside sickbay alerts Kirk to the fact that McCoy has just discovered that Dr. Severn is a carrier for a deadly microorganism which was somehow created “by our antiseptic society.” There’s a vaccine for it which everyone on board the Enterprise is supposed to have had, but McCoy points out that if Severn ever did find Eden, he’d wipe out its entire population in about a week. Severn refuses to acknowledge this and keeps raving about how the “primitive” will “cleanse” him. Spock has a chat with Severn, in which he promises to look for Eden with the ship’s computer resources if he will tell his followers to cooperate. Severn appears to agree, but of course secretly he tells all his followers to try to recruit the crew to their side. Adam visits Spock and invites him to jam with them. Irina visits Chekov, who is helping Spock on this project from auxiliary control, and by standing near him manages to melt his brain enough to collect the information they need to take over the ship.   
  
Adam and the space hippies have their concert, at which Spock joins the blonde two-ponytailed chick who plays the bicycle wheel in an instrumental. While this is going on, Severn is busted out of isolation in sickbay and the hippies seize power in auxiliary control. The ship heads toward Eden, which they have found; Kirk tries to bust in but Severn uses a ultrasonic whatsamajigger to fry the brains of the whole crew. Everyone passes out except for Severn and friends, who steal a shuttlecraft and hie them to the surface.   
  
Kirk revives and manages to stagger in and shut off the sonic pulse. They determine that the Galileo has landed on Eden. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy transport down. Eden looks like paradise…but it BURNS LIKE HELL! Chekov discovers this when he tries to touch one of the big yellow roses, excuse me, alien flora. McCoy determines that all the plant life, including the grass, is highly acidic. They soon discover the corpse of Adam, with the fruit he was trying to eat still in his hand. The rest of the crew is hiding out in the shuttlecraft whimpering in pain (remember, the grass is acidic, and they are barefoot because they’re what, space hippies). Severn’s feet are especially messed up. McCoy wants to take him up to the Enterprise; but he busts out of the shuttlecraft, climbs a tree, grabs one of the cut-up and striped pears, excuse me, alien fruit, and keels over dead after taking his first bite.  
  
Well, everyone’s back on board, minus Severn and Adam, and the surviving space hippies are preparing to ship out to their respective home planets. Chekov apologizes for having let his testosterone talk him into betraying the ship. Kirk says don’t worry about it. Irina comes up to the bridge (because allowing someone who helped hijack your ship and foment mutiny up on the bridge is what we do here on the Enterprise) and kisses Chekov goodbye. Spock says he hopes they will keep looking for Eden and that maybe they will eventually find it or else make it themselves. Off Irina goes. Kirk heads back over to Spock’s station and says, “We reach.” **The End.**  
  
All right. To get the sound of Adam’s nasty faux-folk music out of our heads, let’s hear from a real folk singer who wrote a little song about Eden in 1969:  
  
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aOGnVKWbwc>  
  
In 1969 I was an infant. Here’s a guy singing about how us children of the 1980s relate to the utopian dreams of the generation before us:  
  
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3ZXdvN3orA>  
  
Unfortunately I could not find the period recording of that song on YouTube and had to make do with a more contemporary live performance by an Elvis Costello who just does not sound as good as he did back in the 1980s. The song itself was evidently written by Nick Lowe. In the alternate universe where WOF got made into a TV series, this was the theme song. I still find it a bracing thing to have in the CD player when I am driving to work.  
  
Because it’s a good question. You can legitimately call the search for peace, love, and understanding misguided, or unrealistic, or unreasonable; but why does it have to be a joke? It wasn’t a joke for the students who got shot at Kent State, or for the other young people who confronted the police, the political establishment, and anyone else they could reach back in the late 1960s. Yeah, it’s easy to make fun of the young; the self-indulgence, the belief in the uniqueness of each human individual, the taking of oneself seriously. It’s easy to make fun of people dressing funny and using funny slang and playing a genre of music which when handled unskillfully can become pretty annoying. But believing that things don’t have to be this way, that they could be another way; that war and money don’t have to divide up all the spoils of the world between them; that if you determine that a society is corrupt and corrupting and destructive of happiness and the good, then you don’t have to play by its rules—that’s what produces real change. The harder it is to imagine a different world, the less hard anyone can work to achieve it.  
  
Yeah, all right, the hippie model no longer functions. The drugs are all too hard now, for instance. Far more of the surface of the earth has been captured by the military-industrio-megacapital complex. The country is so heavily militarized and there is so little tolerance for disobedience of any kind that no nonviolent protest movement can last long. If you go down to Yazger’s farm you remove yourself from the centers of power and if you camp out on Wall Street, well, our police are a lot more heavily militarized and there’s a lot less tolerance for disobedience of any kind and the Occupy movement eventually got hustled off the streets and back into cyberspace. And macramé is just not as cool as people used to think it was.  
  
So fine. Hippies funny. What’s next? What have we got? Show me your great new idea, says the last living Bolshevik at the beginning of Tony Kushner’s _Perestroika_ , and I will be there at the barricades. That was 1993. He’s still waiting and so am I. Where’s the new idea? If not peace, love, and understanding, then what? We’re never getting ourselves back to the garden; not until climate change is reversed, anyway. So where are we going? I mean Hell cannot be the only destination left in the world, nor a handbasket the only means of transportation. But nothing changes, nothing moves, unless people believe there’s somewhere to go that’s better than here. And this is why utopia is not a laughing matter.  
  
All this is just to say: “The Way to Eden” is equal parts cheap joke and Star Trek cliché spiked with unbelievably annoying musical numbers. It’s a nasty concoction; and it didn’t have to be. As I have been trying to point out, the search for a better world is important. Spock appears to recognize this, though his affinity for the space hippies is explained in personal terms; he explains to Kirk that many of them feel, as he does, that they are aliens in their own worlds. Spock is the only one of the bridge crew who takes the search for Eden seriously, perhaps because he’s the only one who seems to understand that Eden doesn’t have to be, and perhaps never can be, an actual place.  
  
There were two foundational mistakes made here. One was to fuse the pastoral yearnings that did in fact characterize the 1960s youth movement (and which are still to be found in survivals like the Michigan Women’s Music Festival) with the Eden plot that forms the basis of so many TOS episodes (“This Side of Paradise,” “The Apple,” “A Private Little War,” “The Paradise Syndrome”). As that list reminds us, Kirk has his own pastoral yearnings, and Star Trek certainly has a fascination with the “primitive.” But the Eden plot, as I have had occasion to observe before, brings out all the worst things about this show; and one of them is the Sledgehammer of Allegorical Cheese. Oh, look, they get to Eden and all the plants are on fire. Kind of like there was an ANGEL stationed there with a FLAMING SWORD or something. And don’t pluck any of that FORBIDDEN FRUIT because if you eat of it YOU WILL SURELY DIE. Seriously, when they find Charles Napier dead on the ground with that modified pear in his hand, Spock says, “His name was Adam.” OMG SPOCK I WOULD TOTALLY NOT HAVE MADE THAT CONNECTION ON MY OWN!   
  
I guess I should be grateful they didn’t make it an apple.   
  
The second mistake was making them space hippies. They didn’t have to be hippies. They could have been aliens searching for an alternative to the hypertechnologized world of the future and it could have been a decent episode. But instead, they decided to make the Edenites recognizable as hippies—and to make sure they were recognizable, they made the strokes as broad as they could be. They have flower-childy tattoos on their heads; they’re barefoot; they play bad music all day long; and for whatever reason, they are all wearing soft-boiled eggs pinned to their lapels. An already groanworthily crude caricature takes on the added groanworthiness of the “implausibly exact replication of Earth culture” plot, and the whole episode just crumbles under the weight of all that fail.  
  
And that’s before anyone forces us to watch Walter Koenig try to pull off a romance plot. What is it with all the lame romances in Season 3? Who decided it would be good for the show to try to get the secondary characters laid? Though this does provide a tiny bit of character development for Chekov, in that we learn that he’s always been into following orders and being “correct,” his thing with Irina never works. First of all, if one ridiculous Russian accent is distracting, two is worse; second, I mean, come on guys: does the fact that a woman you’re attracted to is standing next to you really make you THAT much of an idiot? Kirk also gets to be fatherly and compassionate toward Chekov; but it just doesn’t help. There was evidently just nowhere to go with that guy.  
  
As an episode, then, it’s pretty lame. As a cultural document from 1969 it has some interesting features. For one thing, it betrays some real anxiety about these hippies and what they might be able to do. Everyone seems to be surprisingly susceptible to the siren charms of these ridiculous people. Sulu tells one of the cute scantily clad hippie babes that her recruiting pitch is “tempting,” and during the ‘concert,’ the security staff appears to be so captivated by their horrible music that I was sure it was going to turn out that the music was some form of mind control. But no; apparently they were just grooving on that cosmic sound. Even Kirk, who most of the time is just royally annoyed by them, seems to want their approval; when Spock finally explains to him what it means to be a “Herbert,” Kirk says, “I’ll try to be less rigid in my thinking.”   
  
The terms in which the hippies are critiqued are also interesting. Severn is pronounced “insane” by Spock because of his rejection of McCoy’s diagnosis; for him, the search for utopia is a self-interested delusion. Irina makes a big deal out of the fact that Severn, though he has always claimed to be peaceful and nonviolent, is using a sonic pulse which might “destroy” its victims, thus implying that their pacifism masks a militant and brutal agenda. Their desire for the “primitive” is understandable but fundamentally naïve and misguided, as we are to understand from the impossibility of Severn surviving (or allowing anyone else to survive) in such an environment, and from the fact that when they finally reach their destination it’s really HELL! It’s all just…so…patronizing.  
  
Spock is the only one who comes out of this well, because again Spock grasps the potential of the utopian dream. His connection with Adam is genuine but also marked by a certain amount of disdain for Adam’s attire, diction, and musical skill.   
  
Oh, yeah, the music. Did I mention that it is foul? And there is SO MUCH OF IT. Watching Spock get down on the Vulcan autoharp does not compensate.  
  
Ah well. We’ll be coming back to the dream of peace, love, and understanding next time, when “The Cloud-Minders” is on  the table.


	75. THE CLOUD-MINDERS

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A great episode and one of the last bright moments in Season 3. Also another Spock romance; and though it doesn't get far, it does establish the seven year mating cycle.

**STARDATE: September 19, 2012**

**THE CLOUD-MINDERS**  
 **Written by Margaret Armen from a story by David Gerrold and Oliver Crawford**  
  
I know I kind of bitched about “Paradise Syndrome.” But Jesus, Margaret, am I glad to see you! And you too, tribble man. Crawford…well, you can stay, but don’t eat all the chips, OK?  
  
 **The Summary** : The Enterprise needs a shitload of “xenite” because it’s the only thing that can stop the progress of a “botanical plague” threatening an entire planet. They’re on their way to Ardana because it’s in the Federation and it’s the only known source of xenite in the galaxy. Kirk has asked for the xenite shipment to be brought to the mine entrance so they can go grab it without delay, but Uhura says that Plassus is expecting them in Stratos, which is their “cloud city,” as in it floats on clouds. Kirk assumes there is some mistake, and he and Spock transport down to the mine entrance. There’s no xenite. There is, however, a bunch of people in jumpsuits with long straggly hair and 3-D glasses, who lasso the two of them and try to take them hostage. Kirk and Spock fight it out—the men all fling themselves at Spock, while Kirk rolls around in the dirt with the woman—until Plassus and some “sentinels” (they are basically security guards, though they wear blankets wrapped around their bodies and hot water bottles on their heads) show up and scare off the “troglytes.” Kirk and Spock learn for the first time that Ardana is divided into two populations: the Stratans who live in the cloud city, and the “troglytes” who mine the xenite and do all the other shitwork on and under the planet surface. Some “disruptors” have started inciting the troglytes to rebel, and they’re withholding the xenite shipment as a bargaining chip.   
  
Plassus takes Kirk and Spock up to the municipal art gallery in the cloud city, where he introduces them to his beautiful blonde daughter Droxine, who is wearing Shayna’s Jiffy Pop bra and bravely waving her navel at the censors. (Droxine’s dress is a different color, but it really looks like the same bra to me, and it doesn’t seem to fit her very well. Maybe Theiss dyed it to match the rest of the costume.) Droxine and Spock are clearly intrigued by each other. Spock and Kirk head off to the rest chamber, thereby missing all the excitement when a troglyte who’s been apprehended by security throws himself off the balcony to his death rather than submit to interrogation.   
  
Spock is up ruminating on the disparity between the two worlds, and decides to see if he can raise Droxine’s consciousness. He meets Droxine, and they flirt archly while the lady troglyte, dressed in a bra/skirt combo very similar to Droxine’s only royal blue, slips into the rest chamber and tries to take Kirk hostage. He springs to life just as her “morta” (a ‘cavern implement’ used in mining) touches his throat. A short grapple later, he promises to let her up if she’ll answer some questions; she promises, but breaks it almost immediately. Kirk calls for some help from Spock, who has just broken it to Droxine about the seven-year mating cycle of Vulcans. Droxine recognizes Kirk’s attacker as her former servant Vana, who has now obviously become a leader in the disruptors. Vana is taken away by Plassus and the sentinels.  
  
As Droxine looks on, Plassus straps Vana to a semicircular pillar and subjects her to “the rays.” Her screams bring Kirk and Spock running out. Kirk is horrified, and throws his weight around to get Plassus to stop torturing her. An enraged Plassus says hey, hey, you, you, get off of my cloud. Kirk and Spock transport back to the Enterprise. Plassus tells the sentinels that if Kirk returns he’s to be shot on sight.  
  
Well, having looked at clouds from both sides now, Kirk and Spock are trying to figure out how to get that xenite. As they bemoan Plassus’s anti-troglyte bigotry, McCoy pipes up that in fact, the troglytes really ARE mentally inferior to the super-intellectual Stratans. Kirk and Spock say how can that be, they’re both descended from the same species. McCoy says that raw xenite emits a colorless, odorless gas that induces mental retardation in people who breathe it. The effect is temporary; but constant exposure has lowered the average trogylte IQ. The disruptors, he reasons, are people like Vana who were removed from the mines to be trained as servants and therefore haven’t had as much exposure to the gas. McCoy confirms that a simple filter mask would screen out the gas and thus eliminate the intelligence gap.   
  
Kirk contacts Plassus, explains about the gas, and asks if he can offer the troglytes a load of filter masks in exchange for the xenite. Plassus refuses to believe in the gas, is an asshole, threatens to have Kirk raked over the coals for interfering in the planet’s government, and hangs on up on him.   
  
Kirk decides the only thing for it is to find Vana and make her the offer himself. This of course involves an unauthorized clandestine mission to Stratos. Spock beams Kirk into Vana’s holding cell. He makes the pitch to her about the filters. She offers to take him to the xenite, which is of course in the bowels of the mines in “a place only troglytes know.” He follows her into the mines, where of course he is ambushed and seized as a hostage. She throws his filter away and forces him to “dig as the troglytes do, with your bare hands.” Course we know the troglytes use tools, that’s what those “mortas” are, but anyway.  
  
Kirk manages to get the drop on Vana and recover his phaser, which he uses to cause a rockslide that seals off the only entrance to the chamber. Kirk contacts Spock and asks him to beam Plassus into the chamber. This takes a while because Plassus is too close to Droxine, who is talking about how much she still has the hots for Spock. But she eventually leaves, and Plassus gets beamed into the chamber. Kirk says OK, nobody’s leaving this room until you both admit the existence of this gas.  
  
Hours go by. Our captain is starting to get that Evil Kirk look in his eye. Since Plassus claims he’s not being affected, Kirk forces him and Vana to dig xenite. He snaps at Spock when Spock calls in for a contact check. His inner trogylte now fully released, Kirk goads Plassus into a fistfight. Vana, watching this spectacle, realizes that they’re both being affected by the gas, and calls the Enterprise to get help. All three are beamed back aboard, where Spock has to pull Kirk off Plassus and remind him about the gas. Kirk is pleased that his demonstration has been so successful.  
  
Back on Stratos,  Vana has the xenite ready, Plassus is hating life, and Droxine is promising Spock that she will go to the mines and learn what life is really like there. Kirk and Spock take their xenite and get the hell out, leaving Vana and Plassus to work shit out the Ardanan way. **The End.**  
  
You know what, I like this one. And not just in a “well it’s season 3, what can we expect” way. It has its issues, but overall it’s very well-written for a Star Trek episode, and though the stratified society thing is by no means original—there’s a very similar setup in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, and in Fritz Lang’s silent film _Metropolis_ there’s the same disjunction between the sophisticated and beautiful surface dwellers and the miserable drones in the underground city—it is a classic for a reason. And the reason is that the above/below split is only a slight exaggeration of the economic segregation that always emerges in capitalist societies. You live in a city? I bet you 200 quatloos you know where the ‘bad part of town’ is, and bet you another 200 that unless you live there, you never go there. In many American cities racial segregation and economic segregation still overlap considerably; the ‘good parts’ have gotten more racially diverse but the ‘bad parts’ by and large haven’t. As for the suburbs, the only real difference between a gated community and Stratos is that Stratos has better art. This kind of segregation doesn’t happen by accident, and it has proved extremely difficult to change even at times where there was the political will to do it—and those times are gone. To hear American politicians talk now you would think there are no poor people in this country.   
  
Oh…no…I’m wrong about that. To hear American politicians talk now…well, let’s listen to Mitt Romney on the subject of people who don’t make enough income to pay income tax.  
  
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU9V6eOFO38&feature=player_embedded](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU9V6eOFO38&feature=player_embedded)  
  
I have an idea for how Mitt could reboot his campaign. He could promise to build cloud cities for the people who vote for him. The remaining 47% would stay on the planet surface and do all the work. That way, for Mitt’s Floating America, the galloping greenhouse gas buildup that would result from his elimination of the EPA, OSHA, and all other government regulation of industry would only create more real estate. Obama’s Troglyte America would perish with the planet, of course; but not until long after Mitt had served out his two terms.  
  
It’s depressing to realize that we’re a lot closer to Stratos now than we were in 1969. Here’s Spock meditating on Stratan society:  
  
 **SPOCK’S VOICE OVER: This troubled planet is a place of the most violent contrasts. Those who receive the rewards are totally separated from those who shoulder the burdens. It is not a wise leadership. Here on Stratos, everything is incomparably beautiful and pleasant. The High Advisor's charming daughter Droxine, particularly so. The name Droxine seems appropriate for her. I wonder, can she retain such purity and sweetness of mind and be aware of the life of the people on the surface of the planet? There, the harsh life in the mines is instilling the people with a bitter hatred. The young girl who led the attack against us when we beamed down was filled with the violence of desperation. If the lovely Droxine knew of the young miner's misery, I wonder how the knowledge would affect her.**   
  
Wow. You know, Spock, MY troubled planet is a place of the most violent contrasts! Those who receive the rewards in MY society are totally separated from those who shoulder the burdens! And you’re right—it’s NOT a fucking wise leadership!  
  
Everything in our cloud cities is not incomparably beautiful and pleasant, though. It’s a little sad to realize that in 1969 they assumed that the rich, left to their own devices, would naturally spend their time honing their intellectual skills and creating beautiful works of art. And sure, there is a certain segment of the rich-American community that does that; but there’s a much larger section that just wants to indulge its appetites in the crassest ways they can think of.   
  
OK, so, we have seen allegories before. Here is what makes this one better than Roddenberry’s. First of all, the writers have created an alien world which is different enough from Earth to be interesting. Second, the writers recognize that class is a complex problem and difficult to solve. Third, the writers use the setting to comment on the problem in ways that a straight-up non-speculative story could not. Fourth, they come up with a concrete plan of action for Kirk that doesn’t require us to believe that Kirk can change the culture of an entire planet just by speaking forcefully. Fifth, when Kirk executes this flawed and extremely risky plan, he suffers the logical consequences of its flawed riskiness. Sixth, the hot spacebabe is a strong and intelligent character who is not susceptible to Kirk’s charm and who is not required to be grateful to the men who make it possible for her to get what she wants. Seventh, the writing is good. Eighth, no major symbols of American democracy appear.   
  
I am not a fan of Spock/Droxine. I don’t object on principle to honey badger having a romance—I mean with a woman. Case in point, “The Enterprise Incident.” I do object to the romance being based, as it appears to be, purely on the lady’s physical charms. Spock does blather about her “purity and sweetness of mind,” but that’s just the tinfoil bra talking; Droxine hasn’t shown any evidence that she is intellectually or spiritually extraordinary, and she talks about Spock and his “exquisitely shaped ears” as if he’s a rare orchid she really wants for her garden. I am also a little sad about the introduction of the seven-year Vulcan mating cycle. As we were saying a while back re “Amok Time,” Sturgeon originally seems to have conceived of ponn farr as a once-in-a-lifetime event, something akin to humans reaching puberty; the implication is that Spock would be mating with T’Pring for life, just as Sarek and Amanda seem to have mated for life. That, IMHO, is part of what makes “Amok Time” so effective: the stakes are much higher, and it generates more urgency for all the characters involved. If Spock’s going to have to go through that every seven years, well, it just can’t keep being that big a deal. I suppose Vulcans can still mate for life using this model, as long as the mate is willing to go seven years without. At any rate, Spock does create the wiggle room that is the only explanation for T’Pring’s thing with Stonn:   
  
**DROXINE: And is there nothing that can disturb that cycle, Mister Spock?  
SPOCK: Extreme feminine beauty is always disturbing, madam.**  
  
So, undisciplined and “disturbed” Vulcans apparently can have sex out of phase. But when have we ever seen Spock disturbed by “extreme feminine beauty?” There’s Captain Hotforvulcans, of course; but what he’s responding to in her seems to me to be much more complex than just “beauty.” Otherwise, the parade of stacked spacebabes that he has witnessed winding in and out of Kirk’s bedroom doesn’t seem to have disturbed him in the least; and let us remember that he’s the only male on the ship who keeps a clear head when Mudd’s Women are around.  
  
But, just to show you how big-hearted I am, I will say two things that I like about the Droxine subplot. One: Droxine’s “purity and sweetness” is swiftly revealed to be an illusion. It turns out that in fact she knows all about the young miner’s existence—at least in the abstract—and she’s just fine with it. Underneath the tinfoil gown she’s as callous as her father, or should I say as callous as any child who has been reared in perfect comfort and never told that she needs to care about the creatures whose work sustains her existence. Two: Once Spock discovers this, that crush dies quickly. Watching Droxine ‘explain’ why troglytes’ lives have to suck is sobering, but Spock still seems to believe her capable of instruction:  
  
 **DROXINE: But Stratos is for advisors and studiers. What would Troglytes do here?  
VANNA: Live in the sunlight and warmth, as everyone should.   
DROXINE: The caverns are warm and your eyes are not accustomed to light, just as your minds are not accustomed to logic. (VANNA is hauled off)  
KIRK: Unaccustomed to light and warmth? That's necessary to all humanoids. Surely, you don't deny it to the Troglytes.   
DROXINE: The Troglytes are workers, Captain. Oh surely, you must be aware of that. They mine zenite for shipment, till the soil. Those things cannot be done here.   
SPOCK: In other words, they perform all the physical toil necessary to maintain Stratos.   
DROXINE: That is their function in our society.   
SPOCK: But they are not allowed to share its advantages.**  
  
He’s still hoping she’s going to manifest that purity and sweetness of mind any day now; but then he finds her condoning Vanna’s torture:  
  
 **SPOCK: Violence in reality is quite different from theory, is it not, madam?  
DROXINE: But what else can they understand, Mister Spock?   
SPOCK: All the little things you and I understand and expect from life, such as equality, kindness, justice.**  
  
You can actually see his crush on her die, right there on the spot. And this is what I’m talking about. Droxine isn’t pure and sweet, but she isn’t evil either. She’s just a typically thoughtless and privilege-blinded rich kid who has no interest in challenging the conditions that make her existence so pleasant, and she has therefore bought into the typically bullshit that the upper class slings about the lower orders. Spock deludes himself about her inner beauty for a while…but once he realizes how limited her “mind” really is, he’s done.  
  
This episode is also interesting for what it implies about Kirk and Spock’s own class relationship. Spock gets to trade eighteenth-century flavored gallantries with Marie Antoinette while Kirk’s on the bed grappling with the fiery-tempered coalminer’s daughter.   
  
As with a lot of the other issues on this show, class prejudice is approached with good intentions, but there are some interesting complications. First of all, since it’s America, the Stratan/troglyte split is sometimes a class distinction and sometimes a racial distinction and sometimes both. In fact, the episode seems to suggest that racism is merely a convenient pretext for maintaining class privilege; Plassus clearly believes that the troglytes are a separate and ‘inferior’ race, but Kirk and Spock assume that this is bullshit. One of my favorite Spock things in this episode is the way exposure to Plassus’s illogical bigotry gradually starts to get under Spock’s skin:  
  
 **PLASUS: How can a mere filter accomplish what centuries of evolution have failed to do?**  
KIRK: Doctor McCoy has analyzed the xenite thoroughly. We've checked his findings through the computer and they're absolutely valid.   
PLASUS : And do your computers explain how my ancestors, who also dwelt in caverns, evolved sufficiently to erect Stratos while the troglytes did not?   
SPOCK: Unequal evolution did not begin until after your ancestors removed themselves from constant exposure to the gas, Mister Advisor.  
  
The way Nimoy delivers that last line, you can see that only special fucking badass Vulcan mental discipline is preventing him from going postal.   
  
Kirk and Spock always insist that there is no essential difference between the Stratan and the troglytes and that therefore they are all entitled to equality. It’s interesting to me that Kirk frequently cites Vanna’s involvement in the resistance—exactly the thing that, in a post-9/11 context, would mark her as a subhuman terrorist—as evidence of her intelligence and her entitlement to equal treatment. For him, the fact that they can outwit Stratos’s security measures, that they’ve accepted a “common cause,” and that they are capable of loyalty and self-sacrifice proves not only that they’re cloudworthy but that they’re intelligent. The “xenite gas” plot, however, seems to be using the intelligence issue to have it both ways.   
  
On the one hand, it suggests that the writers couldn’t get over the idea that nobody could live the way the poor live unless there was something wrong with them, and that in order to argue for the humanity of the working poor there had to be some way of explaining why they’re always committing crimes and getting arrested and drinking heavily and not saving for the future otherwise letting “emotion” get the better of their intellects. On the other, the writers clearly didn’t want to suggest that the poor ‘deserve’ their poverty and all its problems. So instead of going full-bore Bell Curve and endorsing Plassus’s idea that the troglytes are poor because they’re stupid, they use the “xenite gas” to carve out a middle way. Sure they’re stupid, but that’s only because they’re forced to work in a toxic environment.   
  
It’s true enough that environmental degradation often contributes to the problems of poverty, and that I often wondered during this episode whether the campaign to eliminate lead from paint was already underway in 1969. But it seems to me like the “xenite gas” is a way of managing some real anxiety about working-class masculinity—because there seems to be a direct relationship between xenite poisoning and testosterone. Kirk starts to feel the effects of xenite long before Plassus does, and Vanna never seems to show any symptoms.   
  
The existence of “xenite gas” makes it possible to use a simple piece of technology to improve the troglytes’ situation, thus making it possible for Kirk to get what he needs and get out without having to cure the entire planet. The IQ gap that the filters will closed is a literalized version of the education gap that perpetuates class distinction in this country; the implication is that once the troglytes’ minds develop they will be able to change the class structure through means other than violence. Kirk of course doesn’t stick around to see if that will really happen; but that’s more realistic, and it’s better. The ball is passed over to Vanna and Droxine, both of whom know more about their planet than Kirk and Spock ever will and are much better equipped to carry on what’s obviously going to be a very long struggle.  
  
And I haven’t even talked about how Kirk and Spock spend some significant time defending the principle that torture is always wrong even when there are lives at stake. Thank you, Kirk and Spock. Maybe you could come here and do that in my cloud city.  
  
The writing itself is also a cut above. Spock responding to Scotty’s concern about how pissed off Plassus was before he got transported into the mine: “The captain will employ his usual diplomatic balm.” Kirk responding to Vanna’s panic about there not being enough “atmosphere” inside their sealed-in chamber: “Die from something that can’t be seen? You astound me, Vanna.” Vanna herself, spitfire that she is, is also shown to be reasonable and to want reconciliation and equality more than she wants vengeance. As for her thing with Kirk, there are moments of ickiness—notably when he’s holding her down on the bed and telling her that he’s “enjoying” it—but Armen doesn’t force Vanna to fall in love with him. Shatner does well in his scenes with her, especially when he's trapped in the mine. Apart from the practical problems, he seems genuinely upset by her betrayal of him, and when they take his filter off, his brief and suppressed panic is very effective; sure, Kirk's brain isn't as badass as Spock's but you still feel kind of sick thinking about what's going to happen to him. Kirk seems to recognize himself in Vanna, and maybe eventually she recognizes herself in him; but she’s not about to take any orders from him, and she’s certainly not going to pretend to be grateful that Plassus has finally been forced to concede them a couple basic human rights.   
  
All in all, I guess what I like about this episode is the way it assumes, as if this is not remarkable, that poverty is a problem and that those who are not poor have a duty to address it. I keep coming back that scene in the “rest chamber,” when Vanna says she wants to live in the light and warmth. Kirk’s response that light and warmth is necessary for all humanoid life betrays genuine compassion and genuine dismay; it’s as if he’s surprised to find _anyone_ who would support “denying” basic human rights to people just because they were unable to buy them. The fact that Vanna is a beautiful woman who only wears a jumpsuit some of the time is clearly affecting his politics; but the commitment to equality—not just of opportunity, but of resources—is real, and it does you good to see it. Especially after listening to Mitt Romney.  
  
Up next: “The Savage Curtain.”


	76. THE SAVAGE CURTAIN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It defies criticism.

**STARDATE: September 19, 2012**

**THE SAVAGE CURTAIN**  
 **Written by Arthur Heinemann and Gene Roddenberry from a story by Gene Roddenberry**  
  
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me on one of our last visits to the planet You’ve Gotta Be Fucking Kidding Me.  
  
 **The Summary:** So, the Enterprise is orbiting a puzzling planet which is apparently completely covered with volcanic rock and has a poisonous atmosphere but nevertheless shows life readings. Kirk is about to chalk it up to sensor failure and move on to the next assignment when a giant Lincoln Memorial comes flying up on the viewscreen.   
  
Yes. I said that. A giant glowing Lincoln Memorial comes flying up on the viewscreen. Then it turns into a giant floating image of Abraham Lincoln. Then it talks.  
  
You know, I watch these episodes while I work out, and some are more aerobic than others. When that thing appeared I burst out laughing and could not stop for a solid minute. Christ almighty! Of all the ridiculous giant glowing things that have ever appeared on that viewscreen, this is the winner. Giant glowing rotating cube from “Corobomite Maneuver”? Crude, but at least it was enigmatic. Giant glowing head and hand of Apollo from “Adonais”? Cheesy, no doubt; but at least Spock was over at the science station telling us it was an energy field. Giant glowing space amoeba from “Immunity Syndrome?” Yeah, that was a low point, but at least it wasn’t a fucking national monument.   
  
I mean it’s _supposed_ to be Lincoln himself, not the Lincoln Memorial; but come on, it’s exactly the same shape. And really, the fact that Lincoln was sitting in a huge square chair resting his hands on the armrests should have been a hint to Kirk that “Lincoln” was designed based on images from his own thoughts. But this is the summary. I’m getting ahead of myself. Where were we?  
  
Oh. Yeah. A giant glowing Lincoln Memorial has just flown up on the viewscreen.   
  
It says hello to Captain Kirk. It asks permission to come aboard, saying that they will be over its spot in 12 minutes. “Do you still measure time in minutes?” asks the giant floating Lincoln thing. “We can convert to it,” says Kirk. Come on. When have we ever seen these people measure time in anything else? After all the fucking countdowns they’ve put us through, we ought to know—  
  
I’m sorry. I’ll start again.   
  
Kirk gets everyone gussied up in dress uniforms to go meet Lincoln down in the transporter room. Not surprisingly, this suggests to McCoy and Scotty that Kirk has lost his mind. Though Kirk keeps insisting that he realizes that this can’t be the real Abraham Lincoln, he persists in forcing everyone to act as if he is. And Lincoln SEEMS so REAL! He’s so gentle and courteous and has such good humor and he’s so touched to see a “beautiful Negress” among the crew and even more touched when she explains that she doesn’t mind being called a Negress because they’re all totally over being offended by words and then agrees to continue Lincoln’s tour of the ship because Scotty and McCoy have been waiting for Kirk in the briefing room for 2 hours.   
  
Absolutely the only bright spot in this script, by the way, is Scotty’s contempt for Kirk’s infatuation with the faux Lincoln. He’s got all the good lines:   
  
**REDSHIRT: I understand President Lincoln’s coming aboard.  
SCOTTY: Soon to be followed, no doubt, by Louis of France and Robert the Bruce.  
  
MCCOY: What can they be doing?  
SCOTTY: They’re probably in the galley looking at a plate o’ haggis; they’ve been everywhere else. **  
  
Perhaps I should have said “both the good lines.” Anyway, Kirk asks for the guys’ thoughts on Lincoln’s invitation to beam down to the now suddenly Earthlike section of the planet’s surface with him. Scotty and McCoy think that’s an insane idea. Kirk says, well, this ship’s purpose is to contact alien life, I’m gonna go down and contact it. Spock volunteers to come along, since he was invited. A very reluctant Scotty sends Spock and Kirk down to the surface. He and McCoy are distressed to discover that their phasers and tricorders are still sitting on the transporter pad.  
  
So, “Lincoln,” Kirk, and Spock materialize on the soundstage, excuse me, the surface of the planet Excaliban. There they meet “Surak,” the greatest living Vulcan of all time. Oh, wait, I forgot, Spock does have one good line: after Spock points out that “Surak” cannot logically be the real thing—“no fact, extrapolation of fact, or theory” could explain it—“Surak” says, well, would it hurt you to say live long and prosper to a guy? Spock says, “Live long and prosper, image of Surak.”   
  
A giant glowing rock turns into Yarnek, a rocky creature with claws and several glowing eyes in its rocky head. It turns to Kirk and Spock and says, “After all the episodes where they fucked things up by recycling shots and using invisible spaceships just to save time and money, can you believe Roddenberry used his dwindling resources to create what may be the most convincing alien creature suit in the series’ history for THIS piece of shit?”  
  
No. I’m sorry. He doesn’t say that.  
  
What Yarnek actually says…well, you can see it coming. Yarnek has evidently been talking to the Melkotians and he thinks watching Earthlings fight to the death against manufactured historical figures will be both entertaining and edifying. Specifically, Yarnek would like to know more about this human concept of good and evil and find out which is stronger; so Yarnek wants Kirk, Spock, “Lincoln,” and “Surak”—these would be the good guys—to fight it out with some evil historical figures he’s created: Gengis Khan, Colonel Green “who led a genocidal war on Earth in the twentieth century,” the Bride of Frankenstein, I’m sorry, Zora of Tiburon, and Kahless the Unforgettable, founder of the Klingon empire. Losers die, winners live. Let the play begin!  
  
Yarnek keeps calling this a “play,” by the way, although once again the Enterprise bridge crew is forced to experience this conflict as bad TV: Yarnek ties the viewscreen in so McCoy, Scotty, and Sulu can watch. More proof of Auslander’s theory that TV positioned itself as the successor to theater rather film, I suppose; but I guess more importantly the “play” metaphor is the only thing that can explain the worst and WTFiest TOS episode title ever. “The Savage Curtain?” How can a curtain be savage? I brush aside a fleeting image of Darth Maul struggling to keep the snarling, snapping polyester drapes of his shitbox apartment from strangling him (visit [The Sith Academy](http://www.siubhan.com/sithacademy/index.html) if you don’t understand) to suggest that the “curtain” part comes from the “play” metaphor—you remember how, back before Brecht, the play used to start when the curtain went up—and the “savage” part comes from the conflict, but surely nobody in history has ever put two words together so infelicitously. OK, maybe the Congressional Republicans surpassed Roddenberry when they coined “Freedom Fries.” But nobody else.    
  
Anyhow. Kirk and Spock try to stay out of it, but Yarnek decides to raise the stakes: he engineers a major matter/antimatter fuckup on the Enterprise which will blow the ship up if Kirk and Spock don’t emerge victorious. Green suggests that they all team up against Yarnek; but of course the baddies prove untrustworthy and the fight begins. Both teams withdraw to their separate camps to make weapons. The image of Surak, committed as he is nonviolence, insists on going over as an emissary of peace. He is taken prisoner by the baddies and his voice is shortly heard screaming in torment and begging for help. Kirk is burning to rush to the rescue; but Spock points out that The Great Father Honey Badger don’t beg, or as he says, “A Vulcan would not cry out so.” Regardless, “Lincoln” comes up with a plan to rescue them: Kirk and Spock will launch a frontal attack while he sneaks round the back to rescue “Surak.” Sadly, when “Lincoln” gets to “Surak” he discovers that “Surak” is already dead; apparently Kahless does voice impressions. (He must be great fun on Klingon Karaoke Night.) Lincoln staggers back out toward Kirk and Spock and then topples forward, revealing a big ol’ spear sticking out of his back.  
  
Kirk chases Green down and kills him. Yarnek then comments that the other three have run away—apparently, evil flees when forcefully confronted—and so Kirk and Spock win. Yarnek complains that the “good” team used the same methods as the “evil” team. Kirk points out that the “evil” team was fighting for power, while their team was fighting to save the lives of his crew. Yarnek says oh, I get it now. Kirk finally lets Yarnek have it, demanding to know what gives them the right to do this to people. Yarnek says hey, it’s all part of the search for truth.  
  
Kirk and Spock go back to the Enterprise, where everything is now working perfectly. Spock suggests that the Excalibians have the power to alter matter and that they created all the imaginary historical figures based on their own thoughts. Kirk says he felt like he “really met Lincoln” and now has new perspective on what it was like back on Earth in the dark days. And on we go. **The End**.  
  
For Christ’s sake.  
  
Of course this is a Roddenberry story. Who else would come up with this shit? It’s true that the plot is stolen from Gene Coon, who used it in “Arena” and “Specter of the Gun”; but at least in “Arena” Kirk’s isolation is sometimes dramatically effective, and “Specter of the Gun” is…well, it’s not good, but it beats THIS. Abraham Lincoln vs. Gengis Khan? What’s next? _Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter?_ Oh…wait.  
  
This, my friends, is an episode that has aged poorly. It could only ever have worked for an audience that still idealized the Great Men of the Past. For this concept to have any appea, you have to believe that these Great Men were smarter, wiser, braver, in every way better than we are now, and that the experience of meeting such a Great Man—even if you know it’s an illusion—is so awesome that it compensates for little things like being forced to fight to the death in order to create some weak edutainment for a talking rock. A great deal of time is lavished on Kirk’s getting to realize his fantasy of giving Lincoln presidential honors and showing him around his ship—a fantasy which, again, is compelling only if you can enjoy sharing it even though you know you shouldn’t.   
  
We depraved 21st century people know, of course, that the only reason the Great Men of the Past seem better than we are now is that they didn’t have Twitter accounts. No man or woman’s heroic status can survive 21st century digital technology and 24/7 media exposure. Back in the day, when people made up campaign biographies for guys like Lincoln, it was a lot harder to fact-check; so people felt free to invent stories about the young Abe walking 10 miles to return some extra change he was given or Washington fessing up to chopping down a cherry tree. Lincoln, Jefferson, FDR, Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr.—all of them had secrets they were able to keep. There are no secrets now; and so there are no heroes. Unless, of course, we all get over wanting out heroes to be perfect, and satisfy ourselves with the idea that a hero is someone who sometimes does something good.  
  
Anyway. Leaving aside the outrageous assault on our notions of taste perpetrated by the appearance of the giant floating Lincoln, and leaving aside the fact that this is at least the sixth time that Enterprise officers have been forced to provide dangerous and/or degrading edutainment for an alien race (“Gamesters of Triskelion,” “Arena,” “Plato’s Stepchildren,” “Specter of the Gun,” “Bread and Circuses”), the conflict itself is extremely lame. Watching Kirk and Spock make weapons out of rocks and pointy sticks was not that much fun in “Friday’s Child”—and at least that episode was shot outdoors. Watching Kirk and Spock strip the leaves off ficus trees in their molded Styrofoam hideout is even less engrossing. The two most potentially interesting baddies, Gengis Khan and Zora, do almost nothing; and Kahless’s only real contribution is his vocal talent.  
  
The respect granted to Surak as the embodiment of pacifism would mitigate this somewhat if he were not used to demonstrate how utterly ineffective pacifisim is. And if you compare the end of “Arena,” in which Kirk differentiates himself from the Gorn by refusing to kill him, or the end of “Specter,” in which Kirk et al survive the test with the aid of special fucking badass Vulcan mental discipline, to the resolution here, it’s vastly disappointing. The moral in Roddenberry’s world is that the objective matters more than the tactics, which is basically a slightly gussied-up version of American exceptionalism. It’s OK that we torture, because we’re doing it to save American lives, instead of out of natural depravity the way our enemies do it. Hooray.  
  
There is really only one moment, after they get down to the planet, when I feel like something has come to life, and that is when Kirk starts chewing Yarnek out. “How many other people have you done this to?” he demands. “What gives you the right?” One wonders whether this is Shatner venting his own frustration at being trapped in the same fucking plot episode after episode. But maybe I react to it because it voices my own frustration with the “humanity on trial” plot. What sense does it make to make an ethical determination through a contest of strength? It’s like the medieval system where they determined legal disputes by having the parties joust. Really? This is your idealistic vision, Gene?  
  
It’s too bad that Uhura’s last episode forced her to smile and say that words don’t matter in her world any more. It’s too bad that we’re never going to see Surak again in a better episode. It’s too bad that one of the few episodes where Sulu gets some airtime had to be this one. I would say it’s too bad there would never be another season; but unless the networks had decided to infuse a huge pile of cash, surgically remove Roddenberry, and hire a completely different set of directors and producers, I doubt that Season 4 would have been pretty.  
  
Up next: Jean Lisette-Aroeste strikes again in “All Our Yesterdays”!


	77. ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spock's last romance. This would have been a much better final episode than "Turnabout Intruder."

**STARDATE: September 20, 2012**

**ALL OUR YESTERDAYS**  
 **Written by Jean Lisette Aroeste**  
  
 _Thou hast committed—  
  
Fornication; but that was in another country,   
And besides, the wench is dead.  
  
\--Christopher Marlowe, The Jew Of Malta_  
  
 **The Summary** : Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to the planet Sarpedon, whose sun is about to go nova. They arrive at where the last few life forms appear to be. They find themselves in an enormous library tended by Atos…or rather Atoses, because they keep bumping into the same crotchety old guy in a dressing gown. Atos is the head librarian, and he’s replicated himself because it’s the only way to get his work done. Though our trio remains in the dark about this for the longest frickin’ time, from what the Atoses say to them it is pretty clear that the population of Sarpedon has escaped to the past. There’s a thing called the “atavachron” that allows you to pass through a timeportal located in the library; you choose the time you want to travel to from one of these nifty circular metal/mirror disk things and put it in the machine and hop through the portal and away you go. Atos is rather stubbornly convinced that he needs to find Kirk, Spock, and McCoy hiding places before he makes his own escape. Kirk is viewing a file from what looks like the 17th or 18th century when he hears a woman scream. He rushes through the portal, though Atos is yelling at him to stop because he hasn’t been prepared. Kirk disappears. Spock and McCoy run after him; they disappear.  
  
Kirk emerges on the cobbled street of an 17th/18th century town. He’s come to the rescue of a prostitute (or wench of some kind) who’s being hassled by some guys with rapiers. Kirk fends them off. Sadly, McCoy and Spock came through into the ice age, and they are freezing tail. While they’re all close enough to the portal in their respective time periods, they can hear each other talk, so they’re able to let each other know what happened. Unfortunately this means that in Kirk’s universe, they think he’s communicating with spirits, so they haul him off and lock him up.  
  
Meanwhile, in the ice age, McCoy is just about frozen solid and is telling Spock to take the gun, tell ma he loves her, and go on alone. Spock refuses. As they’re arguing, a mysterious hooded figure in furs shows up. They follow it to a nice warm cave located on a hot spring. McCoy is laid down and covered up and Spock is by his side hoping for the best when the mysterious figure drops the hood and is revealed to be a beautiful woman wearing a surprisingly abbreviated buckskin romper. She says her name is Zarabeth and that she was sent into exile here because her family offended Zorkon the Tyrant. McCoy starts to revive, but he’s still pretty out of it. Spock tries to take Zarabeth into coming back through the portal with them once they find Kirk, but she tells him that once you’ve crossed over, you can’t go back; your cellular structure and brain patterns are altered to fit the time you’re sent to, so if you go back to your own time, you die.  
  
Kirk, meanwhile, is in the hoosegow and about to become the defendant in an old-school witch trial. He figures out, however, that the prosecutor is one of the refugees from the present. Said prosecutor is most unwilling to help out, alas.  
  
McCoy must be on the mend, because he’s flirting with Zarabeth. Zarabeth, however, seems much more interested in Spock, and Spock seems quite taken with her. Spock breaks it to McCoy that they can’t go back. McCoy says what, so we just stay here? Spock repeats that they can’t go back, with rather marked emphasis. McCoy starts with the green Vulcan pointy-eared. Spock grabs McCoy by the blue serge, lifts him off the ground, and snarls at him. McCoy is startled.  
  
Kirk manages to outwit the jailer and put the prosecutor in a headlock until he agrees to help. The prosecutor tells him about the whole cellular structure thing. Kirk remembers Atos blathering about how he wasn’t ‘prepared.’ Prosecutor guy says well shit, if you weren’t prepared, you can only survive for a few hours in this time period, you better get your ass back to the portal, here, come with me.  
  
Blissfully unaware of his impending doom, Spock snacks on some cooked flesh with Zarabeth and realizes that something is happening to him. It’s not too long before he’s swept Zarabeth off her feet and snuggled her down into the bearskins for what appears to be the first and only time in the series that Spock actually has sex. I mean with a woman.  
  
Kirk finds the portal and goes through it. Alas, Atos is more cantankerous than ever, and his replicas are most reluctant to help out. While Kirk starts putting the replicas out of commission, McCoy emerges to confront Spock. McCoy thinks Zarabeth is lying about their not being able to go back. He delivers this opinion at length and rather viciously. Spock grabs him by the throat and shoves him up against the wall. McCoy asks if Spock really wants to kill him. Spock pauses. McCoy points out that Spock is feeling emotions he’s never had before, and that this may have something to do with the fact that they’re 5000 years in the past at a time when Vulcans were killing each other over their passions. Spock says he doesn’t know who he is any more. Zarabeth admits that though she knows she can’t go back, she’s not sure about the two of them. McCoy says he’s headed out to find the portal because his life is back there. Spock and Zarabeth follow him.  
  
Meanwhile, back at the library, Kirk has finally coerced Atos into helping him find the right ice age file. That sun is about to go nova any minute and Scotty is very antsy about beaming them up. They find the file, and Kirk establishes voice contact with Spock and McCoy. Spock, however, is very reluctant to leave Zarabeth behind. He pushes McCoy into the portal alone; but McCoy gets stopped at the barrier. Atos says that since they both went out together, they both have to come back together. Well, there’s nothing else for it; Zarabeth walks sadly away, and Spock and McCoy make the leap.  
  
As soon as they’re back, Atos shoves in another file and takes a flying leap through the portal. McCoy is looking at Spock with concern. Spock says don’t worry, I’m all the way back now. McCoy says yeah, but what happened happened. Spock says that was 5000 years ago, and Zarabeth is dead now. Kirk gets them beamed up; the Enterprise warps out of orbit just as the sun, in a beautiful display of remastered CGI graphics, goes nova. **THE END.**  
  
This is the one that should have been the season ender. And instead, it got completely forgotten. Well, by me, anyway. I have no memory of ever having seen this episode, and none surfaced while I was watching it.   
  
We have seen some gratuitous Shakespeare in these episode titles; but this allusion is actually perfect for this episode. It comes Macbeth’s last soliloquy, in which he reacts to the news that Lady Macbeth has died:  
  
 _Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow_  
 _Creeps in this petty pace from day to day;_  
 _To the last syllable of recorded time;_  
 _And all our yesterdays have lighted fools_  
 _The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!_  
 _Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,_  
 _That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,_  
 _And then is heard no more. It is a tale_  
 _Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,_  
 _Signifying nothing._  
  
Obviously other writers have mined this speech for titles (Faulkner). But I love what Aroeste does with this. There is a literal link to the plot in that “All Our Yesterdays” is what is being stored in the library and it’s exactly where Kirk and company wind up. But in context, that quotation resonates in a melancholy way with the episode’s basic situation. Their star is going nova. The people themselves can escape to the past; but none of that changes the fact that this is the end for their planet. Which means it is the end for their history. Which means that by going into the past to live out the rest of their formerly natural lives, the people of Sarpedon have not conquered mortality, nor have they saved their society. They won’t really ‘live on’ in the past; they’ll just get old and die there instead of in their own time. They’re all no doubt polluting the timeline like crazy; but whereas in most time travel stories that would be important, in this one it doesn’t matter. Say someone goes back to Zorkon’s time and manages to assassinate him. Does that help Zarabeth? Only temporarily. Fuck around with history all you want, Sarpedons. Knock yourselves out. You will arrive at the end of days anyway, and nothing you do can do will ever change that. Your planet will be blown to smithereens, and after that, nobody will ever know that your species even existed. Everything you cared about will be erased as completely as if it never was. So really, while you’re living it and thinking it matters, your whole life signifies nothing. In other words, all your yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.   
  
Of course, this is also the situation that _Star Trek_ was in—as far as anyone knew. Turns out they were able to live on; but this would have been the way to go out with some dignity. I won’t say on a high note, necessarily, because this is not one of the great ones; but it would have been a much more appropriate exit than the one coming next.  
  
The setup makes more sense once you know Aroeste is a librarian. And unlike Memory Alpha, which might as well be a warehouse or something, Atos’s Library of the Future is pretty cool. Those round metal disks which then become round viewing screens are so much niftier than those stupid plastic oblongs they use as tapes on the Enterprise. When you see the Other Time in one of them, it’s like looking through a mirror to a faraway place. Kirk seems quite enchanted with this little device, and who can blame him. The atavachron just reuses the M5 screen, but you know, at least they got their money’s worth. The portal is well done for the time that was in it, and although it’s hard to understand why that works the fact that they can talk through it is kind of cool. During the Kirk vs. Army Of Cloned Librarians battle, Atos gets him on one of those shelving carts and tries to shove him through the portal that way, but he rolls off.   
  
As for the actual plot…  
  
So I said this wasn’t one of the great ones. I think the biggest problem with it, structurally, is Captain Kirk’s timeline. He has to be separated from the other two for the triangle situation with Zarabeth to work. (Though it’d maybe have been more interesting yet if all THREE of them had been fighting over her.) But clearly Spock and McCoy are the real focus of this story, and not as much love got lavished on Kirk’s time period. Basically they just threw him into the Three Musketeers and left him there. (And hey, if you’re gonna throw someone to the Three Musketeers, why not Sulu? I ask you.) There’s absolutely no attempt to make this look like someone else’s olden days; it’s like the ordered the whole costume plot from some Georgette Heyer miniseries. He only has two important things to do: find out that in fact they can go back, and get his ass back to the library. For the rest of it he may as well be playing solitaire, and it might be just as interesting as what actually happens. The wench he saves turns on him, of course, but it’s more of a problem that her period accent is so thick that for a while you think she might be speaking Dogg.   
  
Spock and McCoy get a lot more love. That cave set is actually pretty attractive (though obviously fake), and the frozen wastes are not totally implausible as Star Trek sets go. And of course that’s where all the really important character stuff happens.   
  
Again, if we think about this from a series-ending point of view, this episode gives McCoy and Spock a chance to settle this frenemy thing once and for all. The fact that Spock is supposed to be regressing back 5000 years—the “atava” part of the “atavachron” comes from the word “atavism,” which was the Victorian way to describe a recurrence of the ‘primitive’ in the modern period—finally allows him to give McCoy the smackdown he’s been cruising for since episode one:  
  
 **McCoy: You green-blooded pointy-eared—  
SPOCK: (collaring him) I don’t like that.  I don’t think I ever did, and now I’m sure of it.**  
  
Yeah, maybe that’s the cave-Vulcan talking; but boy, I bet that felt good. McCoy, of course, realizes that this is not a normal response for Spock; and neither is his possessive interest in Zarabeth. Spock is aware that he’s being transformed; but once he gets over the shame, he likes the new him:  
  
 **SPOCK: The cold must've affected me more than I realised. Please pay no attention. I'm not myself. I'm behaving disgracefully. I have eaten animal flesh and I have enjoyed it. What is wrong with me? I tell you you're beautiful. But you are beautiful. Is it so wrong to tell you so?**  
  
No, Spock. It’s not wrong. Eating animal flesh may be wrong, though we do it all the time. Choking the living shit out of Dr. McCoy may be wrong, though there isn’t a fan alive who hasn’t longed to do it at one point or another. But having sex with Zarabeth is not wrong, as long as she’s willing and you ask her first. And THAT, imbecile men of the 1960s, is why you should really work on separating sex from violence. The fact that something is a bodily appetite does not make it wrong. What makes violence wrong is that it hurts people. Sex does not hurt people. At least it doesn’t have to…if you can figure out how to discriminate between the urge to fight and the urge to fuck.  
  
But this episode doesn’t; the sex, the violence, and the carnivorous gluttony are all part of the Atavism Package that Spock apparently purchased before charging through the portal. And as long as we’re talking about patriarchal bullshit: remember my little theory about how the “man-trap” plot, where a woman tries to ensare a man into domestic/sexual captivity, only appears in the male-written episodes? Well get a load of this exchange:  
  
 **MCCOY: Spock. You've been dishonest with me, Spock, and that is also something new for you.**  
SPOCK: I've given you the facts, Doctor.   
MCCOY: The facts as you know them. Or did you just accept Zarabeth's word because it's what you wanted to believe?   
SPOCK: You were told the truth. If Zarabeth is the source, what difference does it make?   
MCCOY: Zarabeth is a woman condemned to a terrible life of loneliness. She would do anything to anybody to change that. Wouldn't you, Zarabeth?   
ZARABETH: I told you what I know.   
MCCOY: Did you? You said we can't get back. The truth is you can't get back.   
SPOCK: She would not jeopardize other lives.   
MCCOY: She would do anything to prevent that life of loneliness. She would lie. She would cheat. She would even murder me, the captain, the entire crew of the Enterprise to keep you here with her. Go ahead, Zarabeth, tell Spock the truth. Go ahead. Tell Spock you would kill!  
  
Holy shit, Bones! What the FUCK was that?  
  
My first reaction of course was, “There goes my theory. Jean Lisette drank the Kool-Aid.” But then I thought, no, there are many other explanations. One: if Spock’s being thrown back 5000 years, so is McCoy. The fact that McCoy’s personality doesn’t obviously change is unflattering to him, as it suggests that even on a normal day he’s pretty much a caveman. But it’s possible that this vicious attack on Zarabeth is supposed to show us that he’s regressing too. Two: McCoy is deliberately trying to goad Spock into attacking him so he can get Spock to realize what’s happening. Three: Aroeste thinks of McCoy as a sexist asshole whose gallantry barely conceals insane troll misogyny. Or four: All of the above.   
  
When Spock finally gets it, he says, “I’ve lost myself. I don’t know who I am.” Normally, after a realization like this, Spock (or whoever else is being recalled to himself after a temporary fit of insanity) shakes it off and goes back to normal. But Spock can’t bring himself to do it—to the point where he is perfectly prepared to write Kirk, McCoy, and the Enterprise off forever and stay in the ice age with Zarabeth for the rest of his atavistic life. This is extraordinary. It ought to be as big a deal as “The City on the Edge of Forever.” But it isn’t, somehow. Maybe it’s because you know that this isn’t the ‘real’ Spock. But all the same, I was watching the big reluctant farewell at the portal, and I was thinking, “Why is it that this doesn’t seem real to me somehow?”  
  
And slowly, I thought to myself, “Wait a minute. Frozen tundra. Whistling snow. The two forbidden lovers having the most passionate and beautiful nights of their existence while outside the arctic winter blows. A sad, dark-haired man renouncing the love of his life and watching her recede in the snow, knowing he will never see her again…holy shit. This isn’t Star Trek! This is fucking _Doctor Zhivago!_ ”  
  
OK, this clip is crappy and it’s dubbed, but it’s the only clip I could find of Zhivago’s farewell to Lara:  
  
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0QLydqF43Q&feature=fvwrel](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0QLydqF43Q&feature=fvwrel)  
  
Oh my God, it all finally makes sense now. Back in the day, if you were a straight female and you had any libido at all, apparently, you could not resist the appeal of Omar Sharif, _especially_ not in _Doctor Zhivago_ , where he played a noble doctor with the heart of a poet whose life is turned upside down by the Russian revolution. And Lara, the beautiful and mysterious and fiery Lara, and of course Yuri loves his wife and kids but isn’t it so beautiful and heartbreaking, their passionate tormented forbidden winter trysts amidst the ice and snow, and how he sends her away for her own good…man. It explains everything—the ice age, the triangle, the painful farewell in the snow, even Zarabeth’s ridiculous name (cause Larabeth would have been too obvious). Aroeste, evidently one of the many female fans who had a serious thing for Spock, slotted him into the Omar Sharif role and got to watch him play it all out with Marielle Hartley who even sometimes looks a little like Julie Christie. _That’s_ why it all seems a little off. It’s a crossover! And nobody noticed!  
  
Once Kirk gets back to the library, things pick up for him. It’s very touching how he guides the other two back with his voice; and I guess it is touching that Spock finally does go back so Bones can go back too. But Aroeste definitely is not about the Slash Hypothesis. Spock of course accepts at first that they have to find Jim; but once he starts regressing, he spares not a single thought for That Man On The Bridge; and the implication is that if he could have got Bones home safe without him, he’d have done it. Aroeste doesn’t share honey badger with NOBODY!  
  
Well, to my everlasting regret, the series ended with “Turnabout Intruder,” so that’s up next. After that, “The Cage;” and after that…there no more TOS. Alas.


	78. TURNABOUT INTRUDER

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And here it is. "Turnabout Intruder." 
> 
> The biggest indignity here is that technically speaking this is one of S3's better episodes. But...well.
> 
> The review wound up ending with a big ol' manifesto about the importance of women to the original show. Which is one of the most important things I learned from the rewatch--how many female fans there were in that original generation, and how many of them actually got involved in creating it.

**STARDATE: September 25, 2012**

**TURNABOUT INTRUDER**  
 **Written by Arthur H. Singer and Gene Roddenberry from a story by Gene Roddenberry**  
  
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.  
  
 **The Summary:** Kirk, Spock and McCoy respond to an emergency call from a research station on a planet where an ancient civilization perished but left behind many interesting artifacts. The whole crew has perished from radiation poisoning with the exception of two doctors, Dr. Coleman, who is the usual guy kind of doctor, and Dr. Janice Lester, who is a lady doctor. Not only that, but she is the bitterest of all of James T. Kirk’s bitter exes. She appears to be suffering from radiation poisoning too. But as soon as Spock and McCoy go off with Dr. Coleman to look for a survivor, she jumps out of bed, paralyzes Kirk with some kind of doohickey, and flips a switch on this big alien machine that superimposes photographic negatives of each of them on the other, excuse me, switches their spirits into each other’s bodies. “Kirk” (in reality Janice Lester) then carries “Janice” over to the bed and is about to strangle her very kinkily with a scarf when the others come back.    
  
Spock and McCoy have no idea that the switch has taken place, so they all beam on up to the Enterprise. “Janice” is taken to sickbay with Dr. Coleman. “Kirk” joins them there, and we find out that Janice and Coleman conspired to kill off the rest of the station crew in order to be able to put this plot into action. You see, Starfleet Academy apparently doesn’t allow women to reach the rank of starship captain. She and Kirk broke up over the fact that she was bitter and resentful about this and taking it out on him. Having discovered this body-switching apparatus, she evidently devised a clever plot to become captain of the Enterprise by decoying Kirk to the planet, invading his body, and then killing her own body with him in it. Since she didn’t get to off “Janice” on the planet, “Kirk” wants Dr. Coleman to kill her now. Dr. Coleman appears to be in love with her but has some scruples about actual, you know, murder. “Kirk” has to content himself with putting Dr. Coleman in charge of her case, overruling McCoy, who can’t understand why Dr. Coleman is diagnosing her with selebium poisoning when she doesn’t show the symptoms. As soon as “Janice” starts coming around, “Kirk” prompts Dr. Coleman to sedate her, over McCoy’s objections.    
  
“Kirk” heads up to the bridge, chortling in a voiceover all the way. “Kirk” tells Chekov and Sulu to head to the Benician colony so they can dump “Janice” there, excuse me, get her medical care without delay. Spock starts pointing out, in his inimitable way, all the reasons why it would be more reasonable to take her to Starbase 2. “Kirk” gets flustered and snippy and doesn’t know basic procedural things and exits the bridge leaving Spock very dubious.   
  
McCoy has also decided Kirk is acting weird, and orders him to submit to medical examination.  Meanwhile, “Janice” wakes up, feels fine, gets out of the biobed, and realizes she’s not in the body she passed out in. Wondering what the fuck she was drinking last night, she calls for McCoy but gets Coleman instead, who of course tells her (and Nurse Chapel) that Janice Lester has gone insane and thinks she’s Captain Kirk—which in a way is true enough. Chapel goes off to prepare a “mild sedative.” When Chapel gets back, “Janice” apologizes for sounding so crazy and gets Chapel to leave her with the glass full of laudanum or whatever it is. She throws the sedative out, breaks the glass, and uses it to cut the restraining strap. She charges out into the next room, begging Spock and Bones for help; but “Kirk” is there too, and he chases her into the hallway and beats her down. McCoy is appalled; Spock is dismayed. After all, they both know that you never hit a woman unless you want her to fall in love with you immediately afterward. “Kirk” orders “Janice” held in isolation (I guess we’ve given up on the whole she’s sick and needs immediate treatment thing).   
  
Spock wangles his way into “Janice’s” room while McCoy examines “Kirk.” “Janice” tells Spock the story. Spock is skeptical until “Janice” suggests a mind-meld. The mind-meld convinces Spock; but the guard who’s watching thinks Spock’s gone nuts, and in order to get “Janice” out Spock has to nerve-pinch the guards, and there’s some outcry. Well, “Kirk” shows up and puts Spock under arrest and announces to the entire crew that Spock will be courtmartialed for mutiny.  
  
At the courtmartial, Spock explains the facts as he knows them, McCoy reports that the exam reveals no evidence of a change in Kirk’s physical/emotional/mental state, and Spock goads “Kirk” into putting “Janice” on the stand, where she rips “Kirk” a new one. “Kirk” declares a recess, during which Scotty sounds out McCoy in the corridor. Scotty is sold on Spock’s theory and wants McCoy to vote with him and, if necessary, help him take over the ship. They go back in. “Kirk” plays a tape of what Scotty and McCoy just said to each other in the corridor. “Kirk” convicts them both of conspiracy to mutiny and orders Spock, McCoy, and Scotty executed. Chekov and Sulu point out with some alarm that the death penalty has been abolished in Starfleet except for General Order Four (you know, the one about not going to Talos; and as we know, even that is unevenly enforced). “Kirk” says off with their heads!  
  
Back on the bridge, Chekov and Sulu have what’s probably their longest conversation of the whole series about the crazy shit that just went down. “Kirk” shows up and tells them to go into orbit around Benecia, since that’s where they plan to bury the bodies. Chekov, Sulu, and the annoying woman in Uhura’s chair (Nichols apparently had something else going on that week) refuse to obey “Kirk.” During the serious freakout that follows, Janice’s spirit momentarily switches places with Kirk’s, but then they switch back.   
  
“Kirk” leaves the bridge to find Coleman. She tells him the transfer is starting to unravel and they have to kill “Janice.” Coleman agrees to set up a poison hypo. They go out to the brig and tell the prisoners they’re being removed to separate cells. “Janice” gets the drop on Coleman, however, and soon they’re all out in the hallway watching the photographic negatives line up with their respective bodies. A despondent, broken, weeping Janice Lester is eventually led away by Coleman, who asks to be allowed to “take care of her,” and is granted this request even though McCoy’s told us that Coleman was bounced out of his last job for malpractice. Kirk watches her being led away, and says, “Her life could have been as rich as any woman’s, if only…if only…” **The End**  
  
If only what? If only she had just shut up and accepted gender discrimination and given up her dreams and never challenged anyone? If only she had accepted the limited life available to “any woman” instead of trying to have the kind of life you enjoy as a man? Is that perchance what you mean, Captain Privilege?  
  
So, Season 3 starts with a woman stealing Spock’s brain and ends with a woman stealing Kirk’s body. We should all thank our lucky stars the show ended before we had an episode about a woman stealing McCoy’s liver. Though Coon actually wrote “Spock’s Brain” I believe, as I explained in the review, that we can safely blame both of these episodes on Gene Roddenberry. “Spock’s Brain,” at least according to my theory, was a parody of Roddenberry Genderfail. “Turnabout Intruder” is the purest, most concentrated, most putrid expression of Roddenberry Genderfail in the history of the show. The fact that it is the last episode they aired—and the fact that “Turnabout Intruder” is actually not as technically bad as most of Roddenberry’s episodes, no doubt because the teleplay was largely written by someone else—makes the insult to the show’s female (and non-sexist male) viewers even worse.   
  
In some episodes the sexism is incidental, or intermittent, or background-noise level, and can be ignored. Not this one. The entire episode is built around a misogynistic caricature of the women who were fighting to be allowed to enter the male-dominated professions. And the message is clear: these women are warped, manipulative, selfish, borderline insane harpies who start hideously abusing power the instant they get their hands on it. These creatures must be kept under control at all costs. In fact, the very first thing Kirk says to Janice in this episode is “You must remain absolutely quiet.” McCoy leaves Kirk with Janice hoping that his presence will “quiet her.” When Janice-as-Kirk goes to strangle Kirk-as-Janice, “Kirk” is shouting, “Quiet! QUIET!” as she struggles. Keeping Janice, and all women like her, “quiet” is what this episode is all about. She starts off in a sickbed and will end in a psych ward, being tended to by her doctor/lover/accomplice—who, it has been established, is incompetent, and has many reasons for exacting revenge; but who is nevertheless given the job of “caring” for her just because he asks for it. Dr. Coleman seems very relieved by Janice’s complete meltdown after the transfer unravels; now that she’s a weeping puddle of despair and failure he can ‘love’ her again. Better a gibbering wreck than an ambitious woman.   
  
The body-switching literalizes the stereotype of professional women as failed/imitation men in some interestingly crude ways. Janice doesn’t just wear the pants; she puts on the body, balls included. But there is actually nothing trans about Janice. She’s not a man trapped in a woman’s body; she’s a woman trapped in a woman’s body. Her scheme fails precisely because even entering a man’s body cannot actually make her male. She remains essentially and unalterably feminine—something which Shatner renders in arrestingly grotesque fashion. Shatner’s idea of how to act like a woman is sometimes pretty stupid—in one post-transfer scene with McCoy, he’s filing his nails—but you cannot say he’s not trying. He touches his face and body more; his voice is edgier, higher, faster, and breathier; he smiles and laughs when he’s being defensive or trying to get one past somebody. In one of “Kirk’s” last scenes with Coleman he insinuates himself into Coleman’s personal space just like one of his spacebabes would do it. When Janice-as-Kirk loses it, Shatner’s voice goes higher instead of louder. For better or worse—all right, for worse--Shatner succeeds in rendering Janice-as-Kirk just as weird and bizarre and horrifying as this episode wants gender ambiguity to be. He completely earns, for instance, the line in which Scotty comments that despite all the changes Kirk’s been through over the past few years, the feminine “Kirk” is _so_ alien that body-switching becomes the only reasonable explanation:  
  
 **SCOTTY: I’ve seen the captain feverish, sick, drunk, delirious, terrified, overjoyed, boiling mad. But up to now, I have never seen him red-faced with hysteria.**  
  
Thank you, Scotty, for actually saying the word “hysteria.” Cause otherwise we might not have realized just how full of patriarchal bullshit this episode is.   
  
Hysteria comes from the Greek word for womb. The Greeks had some crazy ideas about that organ. One of them was that menstrual cramps were caused by the womb migrating throughout the female body. (The cure, of course, was to get pregnant, since that settled the womb down.) Freud was the one who really made hysteria a household word in the late nineteenth century. Hysteria, as Freud understood it, was a disorder in which psychological neuroses manifested in physical symptoms. The study of hysteria in the nineteenth century is a fascinating topic; but my point right now is that Janice-As-Kirk’s “hysteria” is the dead giveaway because, of course, only those who have wombs can be hysterical. All the modern connotations of “hysteria” and “hysterical”—manic laughter, emotional volatility, physical tantrums driven by uncontrolled and impotent rage—were marked as feminine long ago, and it is precisely because women are presumed to be prone to hysteria that they have to be kept out of these masculine jobs like starship captain where you need to be logical and rational and objective all the time. Yeah, like Kirk always is.  
  
It’s because she’s hysterical that Janice-as-Kirk makes the worst starship captain in the history of ever. Unable, being female, to assume power as her natural right and entitlement, she is so insecure about her own authority that she constantly undermines it by over-asserting it. She’s incapable of using power sparingly or rationally; what starts as unwarranted snippiness to Spock over a minor disagreement escalates with every obstacle or challenge she encounters until she’s charging around ordering beheadings as if she were the Red Queen. Following the model Roddenberry established for women, she is both overwhelmingly powerful and completely impotent. For all her tyrannical behavior, she ultimately can’t secure the cooperation of the men beneath her. Because men only respond to the kind of natural, innate, God-given power of command that inheres in guys like Captain Kirk—and which can never inhere in a body that contains one of those crazy-making wombs.  
  
Oh, there’s more; the demonization of ambitious women, the whole thing about how Janice’s real problem is that she hates being a woman (and not that being a woman, in this universe, sucks rocks), the way she’s still hung up on Kirk even though she hates him and he certainly has no use for her; but what’s the use? It’s an episode about why women should never be entrusted with power. How much more suck do you want?  
  
It’s a plot that, in different hands, might have had some possibilities. “Kirk” gloats after the initial switch about how Kirk finally gets to know the pain of being a woman; and if Kirk had been allowed to actually learn from that, there might have been something we could salvage here. But Kirk-as-Janice is a real disappointment in that regard. Sondra Smith does all right with Kirk-as-Janice from the neck up; but she never really gets Shatner’s physicality. As with a lot of Star Trek’s female guest stars, she’s not comfortable with the kind of strength the role calls for her to project. When “Kirk” beats her up in the corridor, for instance, she crumples instantly instead of fighting back, as Kirk would instinctively do whether he was in a woman’s body or not. This makes it harder to see Kirk in Janice than it is to see Janice as Kirk—which is too bad, because there’s some very interesting Spock stuff in this episode. The one thing I will say in this episode’s favor is that unlike, say, the many body switching episodes of _The X-Files_ , “Turnabout Intruder” doesn’t insult our intelligence—or that of the characters—by waiting until the last minute for someone to get what’s happening. As Spock says in the courtmartial, these guys have seen enough crazy shit in this universe to know that something like this is possible; certainly it makes perfect sense that Spock is willing to consider the proposition, especially after the mindmeld. Of course, the fact that everyone notices the change right away—Spock notes that “Kirk’s” “aberrant behavior” is obvious even to the crew—merely underscores how fundamentally different men and women are. But I do like the way Spock, having done the mindmeld, rallies to “Janice’s” side and continues defending her even at the risk of having his head cut off. Kirk-as-Janice tells Spock, “You know the Captain better than anyone in the universe.” Finally, it is acknowledged; and Spock demonstrates it in various ways. The way he snarks at “Kirk” after he figures it out is masterful, and you’d be able to enjoy it if only you could avoid knowing that what Spock is really doing is taunting and belittling a woman for usurping That Man on the Bridge’s place. The fact that Spock and Kirk are momentarily a heterosexual couple is also interesting, and in different hands, something really important could have been done with that.   
  
But this episode was in Roddenberry’s hands, and so it is what it is. And so let me just say this. All y’all out there who think we’re overreacting to this shit and should just calm down and watch the show and stop criticizing it cause that ruins it for everyone? Yeah, you. Don’t tell me how to watch this show. Cause you know what? Women helped build  _Star Trek_.  
  
You doubt me? Allow me to elaborate.  
  
Without Margaret Armen there’s no “Gamesters of Triskelion.” There’s no “Paradise Syndrome” and no “Cloud Minders.” Star Trek without quatloos, troglytes, and KIROOOOOOK!!!? It cannot be. Without Jean Lisette Aroeste there’s no “Is there In Truth…?” or “All Our Yesterdays.” Without Judy Brown there’s no “Tholian Web.” I still believe that John F. Black’s wife wrote most of the good stuff in “The Naked Time.”   
  
Without D. C. Fontana, Spock is not Spock. There’s no “Paradise Syndrome,” no “Enterprise Incident,” and no “Journey to Babel.” There are none of the little character touches she painstakingly added during her work reshaping the lame scripts that came across her desk every week. Without Fontana, “The City on the Edge of Forever” would be about drug dealing and space pirates. Without Fontana, legions of scripts that still kind of sucked despite all she could do for them would have sucked a lot harder.   
  
You think Uhura is just window-dressing? Watch "Turnabout Intruder" and you find out how much is missing when she's not on the bridge. Without Nichelle Nichols there's no "Mirror, Mirror," there's no "Plato's Stepchildren," and "Trouble with Tribbles" is a very different experience. Without Grace Lee Whitney, there's no "Enemy Within." Without Majel Barrett...well, all right, even I cannot say that Nurse Chapel has ever added much value. And then there's all the women guest stars. Joanne Linville, whose performance elevated "The Enterprise Incident" from crap to classic. Celia Lovsky, whose T'Pau gave the ponn farr ritual in "Amok Time" all the gravitas it needed. And all the others--Julie Newmar, Diana Muldaur, Joan Collins--who braved the crazy outfits.   
  
Without Bjo Trimble, this show runs for one season. And I refuse to believe that Bjo worked alone, or that many of the fans she led the charge with were not also women.   
  
You get my point. Star Trek without women is not Star Trek. Women put a lot into this show and it’s not unreasonable to want something out of it. But Gene evidently didn’t understand that. And so, the show heads into the sunset with… _this_. It’s not right and it’s not fair; but it is what it is. It does leave a horrible aftertaste, though.  
  
Up next: we go back to the origin with “The Cage.” And after that…nothing.


	79. THE CAGE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As a coda to the review project, I watched "The Cage" for the first time. Very, very interesting to look at in that context.
> 
> "Despite the fact that Kirk does not appear, The Cage" also explains where K/S came from and why, actually, for real, it is pretty much canon.

**STARDATE: October 2, 2012**

**THE CAGE**  
 **Written by Gene Roddenberry**  
  
Man, are we lucky this pilot didn’t get picked up.  
  
“The Cage,” of course, is largely incorporated into “The Menagerie,” so most of the plot is already familiar to us: Captain Pike and the Enterprise respond to what they believe is a distress call from Talos 4. A landing party goes down and finds a “refugee camp” which turns out to be an illusion created for the purpose of ensnaring Pike and caging him up so he can be a breeding partner for Vina, the lone human survivor of the ship that crashed there 18 years before. The Talosians inflict various hallucinations on him and eventually bring down Number One and Yeoman Colt to share the cell with him. Pike manages to get the jump on his keeper and they escape the illusion, returning to the ship sans Vina, who turns out to be old and misshapen and ugly and not young, hot, beautiful, and fertile at all. The End.  
  
Or so we thought. There is more to “The Cage” than what’s in “The Menagerie.” And some of this ‘more’ is very bad news.  
  
To begin with the less bad news: the most interesting thing to me about “The Cage” was getting to see more of what the beta version of the Star Trek world looked like. Because it’s a pilot, a lot of time is spent demonstrating the range of special effects, some of which are literally rough around the edges (especially the first shot that takes us onto the bridge via the overhead skylight). That part of it actually does sort of convey a sense of how cool all this was back before we got used to it. Some of the effects didn’t survive. For instance, the first time they go into “time warp”—they’re all calling it “time warp factor” at this point—there is a pretty long shot of stars superimposed on the image of the bridge; the stars speed by at an accelerating rate while the theme song plays. I suppose initially they thought they needed to give people a sense that the ship was speeding up. It would have been unwieldy to keep, and of course the music is nothing to write home about; but that one time, it was kind of pretty. The transporter effect survives virtually unchanged except for the fact that on the pilot set the transporter pad was really badly lit. The transporter pad also looks the same, although since that design was stolen straight from _Forbidden Planet_ that’s what you would expect. The sound effects survived virtually intact.  
  
As for the look of the Enterprise, the layout of the bridge survives but the look is much more retro—more visible metal, less streamlining, and way more active video monitors on the bridge than in the final set. The monitors look a lot more like old-school TV sets than they do in the show. They envisioned a kind of no-touch-screen technology—Spock changes the image on one of the screens by waving his hand in front of it—which disappeared in the next pilot. The handheld technology is also retro; the phasers look like ray guns from the 1950s and the communicators are these gigantic metal things that are the size of iPads but look like they were made out of radiator grilles.  
  
[](http://idairsauthor.livejournal.com/pics/catalog/303/7243)  
  
As corny as the original Enterprise set looks now, it is vastly more attractive, and much more futuristic, than the one they built for the pilot.  
  
Also, in “The Cage” they’re still using paper. It’s multicolored and it feeds out of these horizontal slots in the computer consoles. The reports the yeomen walk around asking Pike to sign are carried in gigantic metal binders. Going paperless really de-cluttered that environment.  
  
[](http://idairsauthor.livejournal.com/pics/catalog/303/7550)  
  
The costumes are more obviously military-inspired; they all wear these gray jackets when they beam down, and there’s a scene where they’re all grabbing phasers out of the weapons lockers and stuffing them into underarm holsters before putting their jackets on. Much more practical than the uniforms they went with—you spend the whole three seasons wondering why no one ever wears a coat on this show—but the elimination of the jackets and holsters was undoubtedly part of the general streamlining of the design, the importance of which I now fully appreciate.  
  
The cast is also rough around the edges. The ship’s doctor is an old coot, but nowhere near as engaging as Kelley; he’s a little too close to “Get off my lawn!” too much of the time. The communications officer is a complete nonentity. I have spoken elsewhere of my disappointment regarding Majel Barrett as Number One. As for Spock, no one seems to have a handle on the character yet apart from the ears. He shouts a lot of his dialogue, for no reason I can understand; maybe they told him to ‘sound alien’ and this is what he came up with. He smiles and laughs in an unSpockly way when he encounters the only form of flora left on Talos—a plant with blue leaves that makes a singing noise, which I thought was a nice touch. Spock’s low point in the episode comes after Number One and Yeoman Colt vanish from the transporter pad and he makes a big “OMG totally floored” gesture and yells out, “The women!”  
  
Ah yes. The women.  
  
“The Cage” finally gives us the prehistory of Yeoman Rand’s character; and it’s not pretty. The Enterprise crew is supposed to have gone through a really shitty battle right before “The Cage” begins; and in this battle, it transpires, Pike’s yeoman was killed. He was therefore assigned another, and that’s how the captain of the Enterprise winds up with a female yeoman. Pike hates having a female yeoman. She is literally in his way; in both of her appearances on the bridge he almost walks right into her. He is inspired after her first appearance to rant about how he hates having “women on the bridge,” causing Number One to look over at him in a wounded way. (There are actually other women on the bridge too, but they apparently don’t count.) Pike then mutters something about how he didn’t mean any offense and “you’re different.” So, Number One is not a woman because she is intelligent and useful. Thanks, Gene.  
  
The actress playing Colt looks much younger than Grace Lee Whitney did. In a way, the youth makes that character make a little more sense. I know Yeoman Rand was found to be sexy by many of the show’s male fans; but to me she always seemed weirdly maternal, or maybe like a bossy older sister. She doesn’t have that starry-eyed look of wonder that was supposed to be part of the original character.  
  
But here’s the worst part: On the evidence of “The Cage,” it appears that the female yeoman character’s main function was to have a crush on Captain Pike—which would then put her in permanent competition with Number One, who is also secretly hot for Captain Pike. We know that they are both hot for him because the Talosians tell Captain Pike that Colt has always had a thing for him but thought until now that he was inaccessible, and that Number One’s unemotional façade is a “pretense” and that she frequently has “fantasies” about Pike. Even worse, Colt and Number One are conceived of as the yin and yang of femininity, Number One being the brainy defeminized woman and Colt being the young hot woman whose “exceptionally strong female drives” dwarf Number One’s pitifully stunted ones. So I know, female first officer, woohoo; but people, if they had gone with this setup, we would have had years of watching Smart Woman and Hot Woman catfighting over Handsome Male Authority Figure. I think that for me that would have pretty much sucked all the awesome out of this scenario.  
  
How do I know this? Well, we get a taste of it in the final banter scene, most of which was not included in “The Menagerie.” As Pike is looking forward to getting back to normal after his interesting stay on Talos, Yeoman Colt gets in his way again. Pike signs the report. She stands there at attention. Then she blurts out, “Captain, I was wondering…who would have been Eve?”  
  
She is referring, of course, to the Talosians’ attempts to pimp her and Number One out to him as alternative breeding partners. And what she REALLY wants to know is: hey, would you have picked me? Am I hotter than the other woman? Hey, Captain, look at my legs! And then—because if there’s a way to make it worse, Roddenberry will find it—Number One snaps at her and tells her she’s delivered her report and she should clear out. Oh, so Smart Woman is pulling rank on her competition cause SHE wants to be Eve too. I am quickly running out of scorn…oh wait. Here’s the ship’s doctor asking what the Eve thing means. “Eve as in Adam?” he says, with a twinkle in his cantankerous eye. “As in all ship’s doctors are dirty old men,” Pike responds.  
  
Well, now we know why McCoy was always played as a sensualist. But…really…say, the experience of being locked in a cell with you by hostile super-powerful telepathic beings has totally fueled my erotic fantasies about you, and would you mind confirming by sense of self-worth by saying that you find me hotter than another woman who’s smarter than me? Cut power to the warp drive, Scotty, I can’t take much more o’ THIS!  
  
And yet…and yet there is more.  
  
OK, so, you remember back in “The Menagerie,” when Pike is talking about his fantasy of going to Orion to become a trader, the ship’s doctor does in fact—I checked this—use the phrase “green animal women.” In “The Menagerie,” you may recall, the imaginary Commodore Mendez describes these green Orion women as being “like animals” and saying that “no man can resist them.” Representing sexualized women as animals whose magical hotness relieves men of all responsibility for their conduct is pretty low. Can Gene go lower?  
  
Yes he can!  
  
In the green Vina fantasy, Pike and two buddies are lounging poolside while green Vina gyrates. They talk about how great this all is, Pike gets hot and bothered, and then the buddy who is wearing a Starfleet uniform complete with insignia says to Pike, “Funny how they are on this planet. Actually _like_ being taken advantage of.”  
  
DING DING DING! WE HAVE A WINNER! Gene Roddenberry, in the freaking founding document of Star Trek, created a planet full of women who enjoy being raped. My friends, we have hit rock fucking bottom.  
  
Maybe.  
  
So, the “actually like being taken advantage of” line was excised from “The Menagerie” and replaced with Mendez’s comment about their irresistible animalistic nature. Perhaps someone pulled Gene’s coat on that one. Maybe it was Majel Barrett. “The Menagerie” ends with Kirk watching an image of Pike and Vina, rejuvenated and all that, heading hand in hand into the subterranean lair to be doped up with addictive illusions for the rest of their natural lives. I always wondered where that shot came from. In the story as told in “The Menagerie,” there’s never a moment where the two of them look psyched to be together—at least not one that takes place outside. Well, now I know. In “The Cage,” after Pike asks the Talosians whether they’ll give Vina back “her illusion of youth and beauty,” the Keeper smiles and says, “And more.” And then we see Vina heading back into the mountain hand in hand with…an imaginary Captain Pike. So she’ll get what SHE wants, which is…the ILLUSION of being in love! She doesn’t actually care whether the guy she’s in love with is real or her own introject! Look, a happy ending!  
  
It has happened. I have run out of scorn.  
  
All right, well, let’s not linger on this longer than we have to. Two things to wrap up:  
  
1) We all mock Shatner’s acting from time to time. It is so mockable. But it is mockable because Shatner was a risk-taker. When presented with an opportunity to do something outside the box, he grabbed that opportunity by the balls. The results are uneven; but they are fascinating. Jeffrey Hunter, as Captain Pike, is less mockable; but that’s because he stays well within the very limited action-hero range. Pike is not fascinating. He is boring and I would not have watched him for three years, never mind rewatching him. Perhaps Hunter’s biggest drawback, based on “The Cage,” is that he never seems to be having any fun. OK, most of this episode is traumatic; but even in the final banter, he can’t really snap out of angry brooding mode. Kirk, when he wasn’t being tortured or overtaken by an evil woman or otherwise traumatized, always seemed to be enjoying the ride. It’s the sense of adventure that draws you into this show, and Shatner brought that through much better than Pike did. So thank you, William Shatner, for making this show what it was. I only wish you could have acknowledged how much help you had doing that, and maybe left in a few of those lines for Uhura that you caused to be removed because they threatened your enormous ego.  
  
2) “The Cage” demonstrates that K/S is, in a very indirect sense, canon—because K/S is a spectral survival of the suppressed romantic attraction between the captain and his first officer that Roddenberry was clearly planning to build into the series when he created Number One’s character. Moving Spock into that position prevented them from making any of that explicit. But Star Trek retains at some level the original idea of an intimate bond between the emotionally volatile captain and his supposedly (but not really) unemotional first officer which is freighted with imperfectly repressed erotic desire—at least on the first officer’s side—and always threatening to turn into a romance. It’s not so much that the first K/Sers were seeing what was never there, as that they were seeing the ghost of something that was once there.  
  
Did I say two things? I meant three:  
  
I don’t know what Nimoy did between “The Cage” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” but it worked. Spock 2.0 is superior in every way to Spock 1.0. It’s very interesting to see how much Nimoy’s approach to Spock developed. I’ve been impressed all the way through by what Nimoy was able to do with that role. Spock is really the heart of the show, for a lot of people—but Spock 1.0 couldn’t have been. So thank you, too, Leonard Nimoy, for making Spock a honey badger.  
  
  
  
So thank you, NBC network executives, for passing on “The Cage” and giving Roddenberry the opportunity to rework this concept. The show that emerged is so much better than this one would have been. And I have gotten so much joy and wonder and WTF! out of it, all my life and especially now. I am sad to see it end. I will move on to the films; but it won’t be the same.  
  
This is the end of TOS rewatch, too. I would like to thank all the people who have been following along and commenting from time to time. If you read these reviews, and you enjoyed them, do consider leaving a note on this very last entry. I will enable anonymous comments for the occasion. Until I get flamed, anyway. Ahead warp factor one!

**Author's Note:**

> GLOSSARY OF UNUSUAL TERMS
> 
>  ** _bullshitsu_** : The little-known martial art of talking a computer into committing suicide. Kirk has a black belt. See "The Changeling."
> 
>  **Captain Hotforvulcans** : The unnamed Romulan captain introduced in "The Enterprise Incident."
> 
>  **eyelids on a Gorn** : Analogous to the old Earth saying, "lipstick on a pig." I.e., a cosmetic applied to something irretrievably unappealing in the vain hope of rendering it more attractive. Often referred to in the context of the new CGI special effects on the remastered DVD series. See "Arena."
> 
>  **honey badger** : 1) A ferocious, badass, and nearly indestructible mammal capable of eating anything on earth, of ignoring the stings of a horde of bees, and of surviving the bite of a cobra. 2) A person endowed with the qualities of the honey badger. 3) The most badass being on the bridge of the starship Enterprise, i.e., Mr. Spock. See "Balance of Terror."
> 
>  **Hot Yeoman 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, XP, Millennium Edition, etc.** : The series of female Yeoman characters that filled in for Yeoman Rand after Grace Lee Whitney was fired from the show. They are all played by different actresses and have different names but are essentially the same character.
> 
>  ** _je ne sais WTF?_** : The French phrase "je ne sais quoi" literally translates as "I know not what" and describes that certain something that some people have that makes them special. The phrase "je ne sais WTF?" was invented by my partner to describe the certain something that makes William Shatner's acting stand out--for better or for worse--from the rest of the herd.
> 
>  **MOMIS** : Moment of Most Intense Sucking. This refers to a truly awful moment embedded in an episode which is otherwise all right. See "The Galileo Seven."
> 
>  **Peril Provision** : It is said that one of Gene Roddenberry's rules was that in every episode, the Enterprise had to be put in some kind of peril. This rule is referred to within these pages as the Peril Provision.
> 
>  **pukeworthy** : So bad, wrong, and contemptible that it inspires the urge to heave. 
> 
> **spacebabe** : Refers to an alien woman who becomes Kirk's love interest. I first heard the term at WisCon; I don't know where it originates.
> 
>  **WOF** : [Women On Fire](http://www.plaidder.com/wof), an original fantasy series written by yours truly. WOFster: a person who has read and enjoyed said series.
> 
>  **wonderous wrap** : The green wraparound command tunic that Kirk sports in some episodes. The phrase "wonderous [sic] wrap" comes from [this](http://i912.photobucket.com/albums/ac326/tribbleattack/wrapmacro.jpg) hilarious and profanity-laced tribute to it.


End file.
